Discovery offers hope for coastal regions even as climate change increases hurricane risk
JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY
After suffering seemingly catastrophic damage from storms, an initial layer of ground protection vital to sustaining the multitude of coastal lifeforms revived over the course of several months.
The discovery was co-led by a Johns Hopkins University geochemist and published today in the journal Nature Scientific advanceoffers rare optimism over the fate of one of Earth’s most important ecosystems as climate change alters global patterns of intense storms.
“The good news is that in these types of environments, there are mechanisms that can play an important role in stabilizing ecosystems because they recover so quickly,” he said. Maya Gomes, Johns Hopkins assistant professor of Earth & Planetary Sciences. “What we see is that they are just starting to grow again and that means that as we continue to have more hurricanes due to climate change, these ecosystems will be relatively resilient.”
The research team, led by the California Institute of Technology and the University of Colorado, Boulder, studied Little Ambergris Cay, an uninhabited island in the Turks and Caicos, specifically on the island’s microbiome. The microbial mat is a porous, porous ecosystem that for eons sustains a diverse range of life from the microscopic organisms that make up their homes in the upper oxygen layers to mangroves, which help with rooting and stable, thus providing habitat for even more species. Carpets can be found all over the world in different environments, but the type of carpet that this research team usually finds in tropical, saltwater-oriented, precisely coastal locations affected by severe storms.
In September 2017, Category 5 hurricane Irma directly hit the island the team is working on.
“Once we knew everyone was fine, we were uniquely prepared to investigate how the projection communities responded to such catastrophic disturbances,” said Gomes.
The impact of the tropical cyclone was immediately devastating, suffocating the carpets with a layer of sandy sediment that smothered new growth. However, when the team did their fieldwork first in March 2018, then again in July 2018 and June 2019, they were delighted to see the carpets regrow, with New carpet apparently sprouted from the sand within 10 months.
The growth of new mats proceeds rapidly and suggests that storm disturbances can enable these ecosystems to adapt to changing sea levels.
“For islands and tropical locations with this geochemical pattern, the Florida Keys would be one of those in the United States, which is kind of good news as we think that mangrove ecosystems as well as the The microbiome is quite stable and resilient,” said lead author Usha F. Lingappa, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California Berkeley.
The research team also includes: Senior co-author Woodward W. Fischer., Nathaniel T. Stein, Kyle S. Metcalfe, Theodore M. Present, Victoria J. Orphan and John P. Grotzinger, all California Institute of Technology’s Department of Geosciences and Planetary Sciences; Andrew H. Knoll of Harvard University; and co-author Elizabeth J. Trower of the University of Colorado Boulder.
The work was supported by: The Agouron Institute, NASA Research Opportunities in Earth and Space Sciences grant 80NSSC18K0278, and NSF GRFP.
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