Predicting ​Marsh ​Vulnerability ​to Sea-level ​Rise

Sea-level rise will endanger valuable salt marshes across the United Kingdom by 2100 if greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated, according to an international study co-authored by a Rutgers University–New Brunswick professor.

Moreover, salt marshes in southern and eastern England face a high risk of loss by 2040, according to the study published online today in Nature Communications.

The study is the first to estimate salt-marsh vulnerability using the geological record of past losses in response to sea-level change.

Salt Marsh, Representative Image, Source: Wikimedia Commons, Labeled for Reuse

An international team of scientists, led by former Rutgers-New Brunswick Professor Benjamin Horton – now acting chair and a professor at the Asian School of the Environment at Nanyang Technological University – found that rising sea levels in the past led to increased waterlogging of the salt marshes in the region, killing the vegetation that protects them from erosion. The study is based on data from 800 salt-marsh soil cores. Tidal marshes rank among Earth’s most vulnerable ecosystems.

“By 2100, if we continue upon a high-emissions trajectory, essentially all British salt marshes will face a high risk of loss. Reducing emissions significantly increase the odds that salt marshes will survive,” said study co-author Robert E. Kopp, a professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Rutgers–New Brunswick and director of the Rutgers Institute of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences. Kopp led the development of the study’s sea-level rise projections.

“Salt marshes, also called coastal wetlands, are important because they provide vital ecosystem services,” Horton said. “They act as a buffer against coastal storms to protect the mainland and a filter for pollutants to decontaminate our fresh water. We also lose an important biodiversity hotspot. Salt marshes are important transitional habitats between the ocean and the land, and a nursery area for fish, crustacea, and insects. The take-home point from this paper is how quickly we are going to lose these ecologically and economically important coastal areas in the 21st century.”

While the study looks at UK salt marshes, the counterpart in tropical environments such as Singapore are mangroves, which are just as vulnerable to sea-level rise as salt marshes.

“What is unknown is the tipping point that will cause a disintegration of mangroves to Singapore and elsewhere in Southeast Asia,” Horton said. “We are currently collecting data to address the future vulnerability of mangroves to sea-level rise.”

Source: Rutgers University

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Taxonomy

• Watershed Management
• Watershed
• Wetlands
• Integrated Watershed Management
• Sea Level Rise Risk Perception
• Sea Level Rise Vulnerability Assesment
• Wetlands

1 Comment

1. Climate degradation is not a local problem, it is a single problem for the whole planet and it is useless to look for any local reasons. The Paris agreements call for a reduction in the emission of carbon dioxide. This is not a proven assumption. There are no convincing arguments for the direct dependence of the increase in temperature on the Earth on the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere. "Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation," the need for which, 750 experts say, lead to humility with climate change. This leads to a distraction of humanity from finding out the true causes of climate change, the loss of time, to a catastrophe. Attempts to reduce fuel burning are similar to the movement of a vessel with a hole on the bottom, passengers who are scooping up water. A hole is increasing.
   As a result of human activity, the functions of the main part of the water have changed. Water at every moment of its movement must fulfill its labor mission - to go the way programmed by nature - to supply biota, mineral and organic substances, and clean it, to escape into the atmosphere with the moisture of breathing, transpiration and other excretions of living organisms. Man destroys this link. Water comes with precipitation and returns to the atmosphere by artificial evaporation from arable land, asphalt, reservoirs, dumps. In total, people took from nature 63% of the inhabited earth for these purposes, each hectare of which contained 20 tons of underground living creatures. These are microbes, worms, and so on living creatures that, in symbiosis with plants and terrestrial populations, absorb moisture, transform in food chains and exhale purely individual pairs, which we call natural or organic vapors. Human intervention in the circulation of water reduces food chains, and water from asphalt and other destroyed areas evaporates immediately after precipitation. We call these evaporation artificial. Even more artificial fumes are produced by industry and utilities around the world. The total artificial evaporation creates unprecedented volumes of water in the atmosphere, which destroyed the mechanism of atmospheric phenomena, perfected for millions of years. The cyclicity, massiveness and zones of precipitation have changed. The melting of glaciers, perhaps, has not changed - this is also an assumption. The new regime of water circulation does not ensure the former accumulation of snow in the Arctic regions. Reduced water path in the clouds and premature precipitation and leads to an increase in the level of the oceans.
        Only the all-round and worldwide return to nature of organic fumes and artificial reduction can stop raising the level of the ocean and solve your problems.
           Among the measures to reduce artificial fumes should be the total total water saving in everyday life by every person, every enterprise of all branches of agriculture and industry. Reconstruction of all agriculture with the introduction of shallow plowing, drip irrigation, other ways to reduce water consumption. And all this must be done on every scrap of remaining land around the world.
   One of the most capacious in artificial evaporation are man-made reservoirs. Now the construction of new hydroelectric power stations with the flooding of large areas is increasing everywhere. It is necessary to completely stop the projects and construction of new reservoirs, the gradual elimination of existing ones, to restore the historic biota. There are interesting technical solutions for preserving the generation of electricity without dams and water accumulation.
   Urgently begin landscaping of roofs and walls of all structures in the world, and the construction of new industries, urban infrastructure and even housing to be moved underground and under water. There are such projects.