![]() ![]() “Neither land nor water, maybe both, a marsh is a balancing act, a collaboration between changing elements, uncertain by its very nature,” wrote Peteet and her coauthor Daniel Wolff last year in an extended essay titled “Why a Marsh?” “It’s important to figure out how a marsh works, how it survives, why.” She went on to work on projects with two of the top climatologists of the 20th and 21st centuries: Lamont’s Wallace Broecker, credited with coining the term “global warming,” and Goddard Institute director James Hansen, who in 1988 famously warned Congress that greenhouse gases were warming the planet, and action was needed. Starting in the soggy Alaska tundra as a student in the late 1970s, she later took samples in Siberia, Kenya and the Brazilian Amazon. Peteet, who is based at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, has been studying wetland and lake-bottom sediments for the last 40-plus years. In the background, the Bronx’s Co-Op City. Bronx high-school student Aarna Pal-Yadav at work. Sediment depths under the marsh are measured by plunging a series of screwed-together rods into the muck until they hit bottom, composed of clay, sand or rocks. New York City has already lost around 90 percent. ![]() The nonprofit Climate Central estimates that if business continues as usual, nearshore development and climate-driven sea-level rise could wipe out three quarters of all remaining U.S. It is a global problem, and in the United States, coastal wetlands are the most endangered. The destruction has since slowed, but the nation is still losing some 80,000 acres each year. And, along with inland wetlands, they are home to countless rare plants, birds, animals and invertebrates.īy the 1980s, more than half the original wetlands in the contiguous United States were lost to development. “If you want to lock up carbon, instead of planting trees, we should be protecting these marshes.”Ĭoastal marshes also protect nearby communities from storm surge and high tides, and soak up the excess nitrogen from fertilizers and sewage coming downstream in rivers that otherwise would pollute the ocean. “Most of the carbon in a marsh is below the roots, preserved in peat,” said Peteet. This is true not just of tidal marshes, but inland swamps, bogs and peatlands. Foot for foot, their thick sediments store 50 times more carbon than equivalent areas of most forests. Most have been devoured by centuries of landfilling and development, and the rest are now being slowly drowned by sea-level rise. Peteet, a botanist and climate scientist, had come to measure the depth of the sediments underlying the marsh, a rare remnant of the vast wetlands that once comprised much of what is now New York City. Here, they surround the Bronx’s Goose Creek Marsh. Many tidal marshes around New York City are being overtaken by high, sharp-edged Phragmites, an invasive plant that competes with native saltwater grasses. Carpeted by tousle-headed wild cordgrass blowing in a slight sea breeze, it was cut by meandering creeks and little ponds, and alive with birds. Directly in front of them: Goose Creek Marsh at low tide, part of a 195-acre expanse of coastal wetland. Not far off: the giant towers of Co-op City, the largest housing cooperative in the world the traffic-choked Hutchinson River Parkway and an embankment topped by a rumbling Amtrak train. Behind her trailed three teen students.Īfter a few minutes, the group emerged in view of some of the most, and least, wild land in New York City. ![]() Carefully, Peteet pushed in, step by step parting the thick stalks to clear a narrow path, on the lookout for ankle-twisting watery holes. About 100 feet in, she arrived at the border of a wetland ringed by a 10-foot-high wall of Phragmites-densely packed, razor-edged giant grasses. Wearing a flannel shirt and thick rubber gloves, Dorothy Peteet veered off a woodland trail in the Bronx’s Pelham Bay Park into a thick melange of brambles, fallen logs and poison ivy. It was 10 o’clock on an August morning, and the sun was already broiling. Here, in the tidal wetlands of Goose Creek Marsh in the Bronx, she is investigating the amount of carbon stored in sediments. Botanist and climate scientist Dorothy Peteet has been studying wetlands of various kinds for more than 40 years. ![]()
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