For Concrete, Climate Change May Mean a Shorter Lifespan

A new study out of Northeastern University in Boston suggests that for a dense coastal city like Boston, a more immediate vulnerability than rising tides and storm surges associated with climate change may lie in collapsing concrete. Two researchers, civil engineer Matthew Eckelman and graduate student Mithun Saha, realized that new projections of rising temperatures might have implications for the lifespan of Boston’s concrete buildings and set out to calculate just what exactly those were.