To Fight Coastal Erosion, Design a Bespoke Artificial Reef

It started in the Caribbean Sea. Jaime Ascencio, then a business development engineer working across Latin America, was eager to find sustainable ways to combat the coastal erosion that was eating away at the region's treasured beaches--and threatening the tourism dollars brought in by its seaside resorts. "If there is no sand, there are no guests," he says. But Ascensio, who knew that artificial reefs could make for natural breakwaters, could only find solutions that were neither sustainable nor stable enough to resist the force of the waves. So he went on to get a master's in coastal engineering at the celebrated Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands--and developed one himself.