Have you ever wondered how old Texas oyster reefs are? One Harte Research Institute at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi doctoral candidate, Kelley Savage, is about two years into studying oyster shells to find out how old local oyster reefs are.For my PhD, we are looking at the potential for oyster reefs to capture and store atmospheric carbon dioxide," Savage said.Kelley Savage is conducting the first study of this kind in the Gulf of Mexico. The only two similar studies were done on the East Coast.Theres really only been two studies that have directly measured the amount of carbon being stored by an oystery," Savage said.Savage says that oyster reefs storing carbon dioxide would be huge for restoring oyster reefs on the Gulf Coast."All of our natural reefs of Texas, were not sure how old they are, so we have to age the reef to be able to know how much carbon has been captured potentially over thousands of years," Savage said.Savage studies various oyster shells in her lab to find out how old the reefs are."This shell is from around the 1950s, early 1950s," Savage said.Savage said she and her team are not exactly sure how old the natural reefs of Texas are, and they have to know how old the reef is to be able to know how much carbon has been captured over potentially thousands of years.Im thinking the reefs, or the oysters that I was looking at could be one to two thousand years old," Savage said. "It can provide a lot of services, and then also, at the same time, it can kind of start providing a natural way to mitigate carbon dioxide in the atmosphere," Savage said.Some other services that Savage says oysters provide are water filtration and shoreline stabilization.If you restore these reefs, youre also providing the service of capturing the carbon thats being emitted by cars, by refineries, by anything that emits carbon. So, its a way to, in a way, buffer or mitigate climate change," Savage said.So over all, healthier oyster reefs could lead to a healthier you!Savage says the next step in her project is to determine the ages of the natural oyster reefs in Galveston Bay that she's sampled. She hopes to do that by the summer of 2025.For the latest local news updates, click here, or download the KRIS 6 News App.