JULIE SIMPSON: I came to climate research
through being interested in plants and plant population
growth and behavior.
Plants are super interesting and under-appreciated because they
have all kinds of mechanisms.
Plants can hear.
They can communicate through smell.
They have a lot more light sensing organs
than other organisms.
And it was a case where the more you learn,
the more you realize this is one of the most critical problems
facing humanity.
I do a number of different projects at Sea Grant,
from pure research on trying to understand how carbon
is naturally stored and captured and sequestered
in coastal habitats, to more adaptation work,
working with coastal towns in trying to help them understand
what the implications of climate change
are, what the likely impact on their infrastructure,
on their populations, will be, and helping them adapt to it;
hopefully adapt in time before the weather disasters happen.
So I went to the Chelsea city planner
and said, hey, we've got these students.
What if we pair them up with you and see
what they can do for you.
What are your needs that this group
of students with this level of expertise can provide?
And he said, well, where do I start?
And he ticked off a list of projects.
And the students proved that they
were going to do real work, and going
to be serious and focused, and that they
were intelligent and thoughtful about the project.
And the more the students proved themselves,
the more the city officials were willing and able to spend
more time with them to really make the project worthwhile;
make it more successful.
I just want to know how carbon moves through the world, where
it's being stored, what are the bottlenecks, how much is
in the sky, how much is in the ground, how much is
in the ocean.
There has been a bunch of research coming out
in the last 10 to 15 years around the topic
of blue carbon.
And blue carbon is kind of a hot new buzzword,
and it refers to carbon that is stored in coastal habitats.
Or aquatic.
I think there are probably some freshwater areas as well,
but ocean habitats are really the heavy hitters.
So we're talking about salt marshes and mangrove swamps
and seagrass meadows, where you can often
get a deep peat build up.
That can be several meters deep, and that
can represent carbon that was taken out of the atmosphere
by the plants thousands of years ago.
There was one core at a marsh in Connecticut
that found 4,000 year old carbon stored away
in the peat deposits.
I think that sequestration of carbon in coastal habitats
is a part of the puzzle.
It's one strategy that we probably
need to use in conjunction with other strategies.
We're not going to be able to sequester
enough carbon in coastal habitats
to reduce CO2 to get it back down to 350 parts per billion
or anything like that.
But there isn't one silver bullet
for reducing carbon emissions, or concentrations
in the atmosphere.
So I see natural biological capture and sequestration
as one of the many strategies that we
have to implement together to reduce atmospheric CO2 levels.
The different seagrass meadows that you go
and the different species of grass
make a huge difference in how the carbon is stored,
which is why, in the research that we're doing,
we're really trying to focus on what kind of meadow
promotes more carbon sequestration.
Is it something about the substrate?
Is it something about the hydrological regimes?
Is it something about the current, the wave exposure?
Is it the species of grass?
How can we really focus on which ones are the critical ones that
are doing the heavy lifting?
The mangrove swamps, the salt marshes, and the seagrass beds
sequester at much, much higher rates per area
than any terrestrial habitat.
So, more than grasslands, more than
tropical forests, more than boreal forests.
So they cover a much, much smaller area, because these
are just right along the coast.
Sometimes just sub-tidal, sometimes intertidal.
It's a really skinny band of vegetation
that's doing this work.
There's evidence that coral reef communities
are much more diverse, more robust,
when they have a seagrass meadow nearby.
So there are a lot of synergisms between having
all of these different habitats in your landscape.