The environmental significance of New England's salt marshes

Nice News -  The ocean may be the planet’s biggest carbon sink, but scientists recently dove into another lesser-known climate ally — coastal salt marshes — and found they’re quite the unsung hero when it comes to absorbing CO2.
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In a study published in The Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences, researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst debuted a new way of quantifying carbon capture by comparing satellite data to samples of salt marsh sediment. The samples were gathered at 19 sites, from the Long Island Sound to the Gulf of Maine.
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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.”
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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.”