Amherst, Massachusetts. – In the fight against global climate change, there is a great concern for nature’s “carbon sinks”: those land areas that mainly absorb and isolate carbon more than release. Although scientists have long known that coastal salt marshes are just “blue carbon” or sinks of carbon stored in oceans and coastal ecosystems, it is difficult to accurately estimate the amount of storage they are stored, so most of the focus is on land sinks such as forests and grassland. Now, a team of scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst recently debuted a new, highly accurate method for quantifying carbon capture in Northeastern salt marshes — and a lot.
Their work shows that the salt marsh stores about 10 million cars of carbon in the soil on its top and shows that the salt marsh adds about 15,000 additional cars each year. The results, published in the journal Geophysical Research: Biogeoscience, are an important step in addressing the challenges of the warm world.
The ocean stores nearly one-third of its industrial carbon dioxide emissions and is increasingly acting on coastal ecosystems such as Salt Marshes as carbon sinks.
“From a climate perspective, there is something amazing about tidal swamps,” said Wenxiu Teng, lead author of the paper and PhD. The candidates for the UMass Amherst Department of Earth, Geography and Climate Sciences (EGC) “are they can keep increasing carbon storage. They are not filling.”
This is because by waves, tides, storms, new layers of carbon capture sediment are constantly stored in thick salt marsh grass. In addition, as the glaciers continue to melt, the salt marsh grows vertically to rise with the Shanghai plane, thereby storing more carbon.
“Salt marshes have more sustained carbon sinks than forests or other land sites than forests or other grounds,” said Brian Yellen, a Massachusetts state geologist, research assistant professor at UMASS Amherst and one of the paper’s co-authors. There are many people who are excited about the technical solutions to scrub carbon from the atmosphere, but here we have a natural effect that works well now. Our work helps to shed light on the size of this natural carbon sink, and Provides a way to scale to the rest of the world.”
The team’s work also has warnings – 10 million carbon vehicles are also potential carbon bombs. If salt marshes are disturbed or natural processes change, they may release all of these greenhouse gases, aggravate climate change, rather than naturally mitigating it. “If salt marshes are downgraded by local environmental stressors and the combined threat of global climate change, they will be a huge source of carbon emissions,” Yellen said.
To figure out how much a blue carbon salt marsh can accommodate, scientists all need a baseline to store how much and An accurate method for measuring the rate at which the amount of marsh isolates carbon. Both are difficult to determine, partly because the swamp itself is a highly variable ecosystem with multiple storage rates. The ideal is to take a soil sample from every meter of each swamp and measure the carbon stored in it – this is a very expensive and time-consuming process.
Another option is to turn to satellite imagery, but satellites, powerful satellites, cannot see the carbon itself stored in carbon marsh sediments, noted Qian Yu, an associate professor of EGCS and one of the co-authors of this article. However, the satellite able See water depth and vegetation on swamps, two main factors driving swamp soil formation and carbon storage. The team used a common tool in the satellite remote sensing world called the Standardized Water Index (NDWI) to study spatial patterns of water depth and nutritional vitality to map soil differences across swamps. However, with seasonal vegetation growing and tide changes, NDWI fluctuates continuously.
The team realized what to do was compare satellite NDWI data from multiple seasons and different tidal levels with samples of salt marsh sediment gathered at the site – they had done it, from the sound of Long Island to 19 locations, from Myanmar In the bay of Inn and 410 samples representing multiple locations in each salt marsh were collected.
“We started looking at satellite data mapped against live samples, and we had this ‘a-ha!’ moment,” Yellen said. The team can clearly see that satellite data has special tidal conditions throughout the year and closely tracks the data they collect in the field during the year.
“It’s really about the submerged climax – that’s when you want satellites to capture pictures,” Yellen said.
Once the team knows which type of satellite image is the most reliable one, they can find specific images focused on the Northeast coast and use them to produce the most accurate estimate of how much blue carbon these swamps store and continue to store. “Salt marsh alone can’t explain all the decarbonization of the carbon economy that we are currently entering the atmosphere. We just need to make sure we protect them during this time,” Yellen said.
“These salt marshes are crucial ecosystems for a variety of reasons,” Teng said. “Now, we know that they are not only affluent in terms of biodiversity, but are also helping the most severe angle of climate change in the planet’s environment,” Teng said. look.”
EGC professors Jon Woodruff and Bonnie Turek are also part of her graduate work at UMASS Amherst, contributing to the study and co-authors. The study was supported by the USDA, the Natural Resources Conservation Agency, the American Geological Society and the Center for Indoor Northeast Climate Adaptation Science.
Source: “New England’s Salt Marsh Store Stores are worth 10 million cars of carbon, adding another 15,000 worth of carbon each year”, February 17, 2025, UMass Amherst press release.
Updated: February 17, 2025, 6:01 pm.
Image above and corresponding, connected home page features: USDA via Wikimedia Commons
