This is scientific American's 60 second science. I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

As Houston begins recovery efforts from Hurricane Harvey, a new storm threat, Hurricane Irma is barreling west towards the Caribbean in Florida.

We have few defenses against hurricanes' lashing rains and wind and storm surge, but nature

does provide one.

Wetlands act in two ways to reduce the impacts of storms.

They reduce storm surge by acting as a wall or a barrier

and they act as a sponge by soaping up the the waters that

come down via rainfall. Michael Beck is a coastal scientist at the Nature Conservancy

and the University of California Santa Cruz.

He says as we've paved over swampy coastlines, we've changed how stormwaters flow.

Or for an analogy a little closer to home, rain falls on your driveway, it's going to run straight out into the street.

Rain falls in your garden, it's going to soak into the ground.

And so when you've done that at the scale of whole watersheds, there's no place for the water to go when it rains.

But some wetlands do remain.

Back and his colleagues teamed up with the insurance industry, and using the industry's

risk assessment models, asked how much more damage

would Hurricane Sandia have delivered if all the eastern seaboard's wetlands

were gone and they found that marshy Coastlines saved some 625 million dollars in direct flood damages,

or about 1% of Sandy's total cost.

The researchers also battered Ocean County, New Jersey, with thousands of hypothetical storms using flood models.

And they found that wetlands cut flood damages there by 16% compared to areas of the county where wetlands are gone.

The studies in the journal Scientific reports.

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