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Blue carbon is carbon that’s captured and stored by coastal wetlands, helping to mitigate climate change. Our new film is about mud and the multiple benefits that estuaries provide for us. “You never go into a wetland and just restore one benefit,” says wetlands ecologist John Rybczyk. It improves water quality, provides salmon habitat, protects our shorelines and it also benefits our climate.

When Resource Media asked us to help Restore America’s Estuaries and EarthCorps make a film about blue carbon, we thought it sounded wonky. But as we learned more about how amazing these habitats are at storing carbon, and the scale of restoration work going on in the Snohomish – a heavily impacted estuary with I-5, the city of Everett, farmland and two giant wastewater treatment facilities in its belly – our interest grew. Then we met John Rybczyk from Western Washington University. John describes his fieldwork as a “reverse werewolf kind of thing,” because he can only go out during the full and new moon for the lowest daytime tides. His enthusiasm for mud is infectious.

Soon we found ourselves weaving our way through a maze of wetlands with intrepid jetboat drivers, learning how not to dive headlong into estuarine mud while carrying expensive equipment, and trying to imagine the extensive estuaries that once stretched from Seattle to Bellingham. Today, almost none of those wetlands are left.

During our first day of filming, John and his research associate Katrina pounded a PVC pipe into the marsh and carefully dug out an intact meter-long sediment core. A few years ago, Restore America’s Estuaries wanted to quantify how much carbon is in an estuary and how much carbon can be captured through wetland restoration, something that had never been done at the landscape level before. They contacted John to help them with their Snohomish Blue Carbon Assessment.

The study found that if we restore the entire Snohomish estuary, we can capture almost 9 million tons of CO2 over 100 years. This is equivalent to taking 1.7 million cars off the road for a year. Quantifying this sort of benefit helps to build awareness of blue carbon as a climate mitigation tool and to encourage more investment in wetland restoration at local, state and federal levels.

John and his blue carbon science are fascinating, but we wanted to connect that research with the physical restoration work that’s happening in the Snohomish estuary. What most impressed us were the number of dedicated staff members and volunteers from nonprofits, the Tulalip Tribes, Snohomish County and more, who are all working together to protect and restore these wetlands. And they went out of their way to help us tell this story. We were also lucky enough to have Whit Hassett join us as aerial cinematographer. Her work literally takes our films to another level, and was essential for illustrating this amazing ecosystem that provides so many benefits to local communities and helps to address climate change.

Watch our latest film, Blue Carbon: A Story from the Snohomish Estuary.