After sustaining seemingly catastrophic hurricane damage, a primordial groundcover vital to sustaining a multitude of coastal lifeforms bounced back to life in a matter of months.

The finding, co-led by a Johns Hopkins University geochemist and published in Science Advances, offers rare optimism for the fate of one of Earth's most critical ecosystems as climate change alters the global pattern of intense storms.

"The good news is that in these types of environments, there are these mechanisms that can play an important role in stabilizing the ecosystem because they recover so quickly," said Maya Gomes, a Johns Hopkins assistant professor of Earth & Planetary Sciences. "What we saw is that they just started growing again and that means that, as we continue to have more hurricanes because of climate change, these ecosystems will be relatively resilient."

The team, co-led by California Institute of Technology and University of Colorado, Boulder, researchers, had been studying microbial mats in Little Ambergris Cay, an uninhabited island in Turks and Caicos. Microbial mats are squishy, spongey ecosystems that for eons have sustained a diverse array of life from the microscopic organisms that make a home in the upper oxygenated layers to the mangroves it helps root and stabilize. Mats in turn provide habitats for even more species and can be found all over the world in wildly different environments. The variety this team studied are commonly found in tropical, saltwater-oriented places—exactly the coastal locations most vulnerable to severe storms.

Read more at: Johns Hopkins University

Photo Credit: janeb13 via Pixabay

Cold-water corals, and the species Lophelia pertusa in particular, are the architects of complex reef structures. 

A new synthesis of two decades of data has elucidated the startling transformation of the warming Gulf of Maine. 

More areas of year-round unfrozen ground have begun dotting Interior and Northwest Alaska and will continue to increase in extent due to climate change, according to new research by University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute scientists.

The latest United Nations IPCC Reports describe how limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels can avert the worst impacts of climate change.

Countries around the world pledged in the Paris Agreement to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, or, at most, 2 degrees Celsius. 

North Carolina State University researchers found they could filter carbon dioxide from air and gas mixtures at promising rates using a proposed new textile-based filter that combines cotton fabric and an enzyme called carbonic anhydrase – one of nature’s tools for speeding chemical reactions.

Eastern monarch butterflies covered 35 percent more ground in the mountain forests of central Mexico this past winter than they did the year before, according to a survey from the World Wildlife Fund.

A total knee replacement can greatly improve a patient’s quality of life, but first the procedure itself will create nearly 30 pounds of waste, about half of which presents a biohazard and requires energy-intensive treatment for safe disposal.

A new study by a team of scientists and policy analysts from across the nation suggests that there are multiple pathways to achieve this goal – but big commitments will need to be made, immediately.