The ocean may be the planet’s biggest carbon sink, but scientists recently examined another lesser-known climate ally.
In the race to combat global climate change, much attention has been given to natural “carbon sinks:” those primarily terrestrial areas of the globe that absorb and sequester more carbon than they release. While scientists have long known that coastal salt marshes are just such a sink for “blue carbon,” or carbon stored in the ocean and coastal ecosystems, it has been difficult to get an accurate estimate of just how much they store, and so most of the focus has been on terrestrial sinks such as forests and grasslands.
Salt marshes are coastal wetlands that are flooded and drained by salt water brought in by the tides.
Now, as revealed in a study published in The Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences, researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have instigated a novel way of quantifying carbon capture by comparing satellite data to samples of salt marsh sediment, gathered from multiple sites from the Long Island Sound to the Gulf of Maine.
They found that New England’s salt marshes store 10 million cars’ worth of carbon and add approximately 15,000 additional cars’ worth each year. As to how they manage to store so much, lead author Wenxiu Teng explained in a statement: “The amazing thing about tidal marshes, from a climate perspective, is that they can continuously increase their carbon storage. They don’t fill up.”
This means there’s yet another reason to protect these ecosystems: “Salt marshes are crucially important ecosystems for all sorts of reasons,” Teng said. “Now we know that they’re rich not only in terms of biodiversity, but also in terms of helping the planet to weather the worst of climate change.”