You're listening to TED Talks Daily. I'm your host, Elise Hugh. Today, a topic I admit I never thought much about before, seagrass. It turns out it's a crucial component to tackling climate change. In his talk from Ted Monterey in 2021, marine scientist Carlos Duarte shares the magic

and the power of the seagrass ecosystem, how it's a natural way to sequester carbon, and how

important this is to the planet.

I'm here to unveil a new carbon removal technology, one out of sight and uncelebrated.

Meet our champions, seagrass, a very unlikely champion, but yet a remarkable power of carbon removal.

Seagrasses occupy only 0.1% of the seafloor, but they remove one-third of all of the

carbon that gets sequestered in the seafloor annually. They are no ordinary seagrasses,

and yet we didn't know much about them, and when I started my journey of research and science with seagrasses about four decades ago,

we knew that they were flowering plants that had adapted to grow and colonize the ocean,

but we didn't know how amazing adaptations that was required to achieve this feat.

In fact, only seven years ago, we published the first genome sequence of a seagrass,

and we were mesmerized at the amazing adaptations that were required to be able to colonize the ocean.

And now we understand why only 70 species from among 300,000 or so species of flower

plants that are present in the biosphere have conquered the ocean. Sea grasses grow by extending

a rhizome that is a subterranean stem that elongates at rates of about one centimeter to about five meters per year,

and they branch and extend along the sea floor forming large clones.

And we knew the clones can be quite large, but we were surprised when in the Mediterranean,

we found 10 years ago a clone that occupied 15 kilometers.

That is the size of the island of Manhattan.

And this is a very remarkable clone, but we also calculated that the seed that gave rise to this clone germinated in the seafloor 200,000 years ago.

This is one of the oldest living things in the planet. And the meadow, where this mega clone is

growing, is now recognized as a wall, a marine-herited site. Of the island of Ibiza, this meadow occupies

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