Coastal Meringues: Are Salt Marshes Inflated with Excess Void Spaces?

Failure to stay above sea level is among many ways that salt marshes may be destroyed. This race against the sea is carried out by vertical accretion. Accretion is partly the accumulation of material mediated by vegetative and sedimentary feedbacks. Prognoses for salt marshes based on studies of these variables have proven useful, but they may also be failing to read between the lines. After all, the majority of a salt marsh's volume is typically comprised of void spaces, which seem to be under-examined in our current predictions of salt marsh survival. Salt marshes may be inflated with excess void spaces, occupying greater volumes than sedimentary predictions would otherwise assume. To test this hypothesis, benthic porosity measurements were drawn from a USGS database of thousands of seabed samples along the U.S. Atlantic and Gulf coasts. Seabed porosities were used to geostatistically interpolate expected porosities at selected salt marsh sites. Measurements of known salt marsh porosities were drawn from several case studies in the literature. These salt marsh porosity measurements were georeferenced so they could be compared to the expected seabed porosity determined by spatial interpolation. Initial results show that these salt marshes tend to be more porous than the benthic sediments surrounding them. This excess porosity can be an important contributor to marsh volume (i.e. elevation), and ultimately to marsh survival. Furthermore, it raises several questions about the source of this void space and the mechanism of its retention. Salt marsh volume appears to be greater than we would expect based on the sum of its parts. Therefore, predictions of salt marsh accretion may systematically underestimate void volumes and be overly pessimistic about marsh response to relative sea level rise.