00:00I remember hearing once that the most powerful emotion that you can experience is wonder.
00:09If you have a really wondrous experience in a film, in a photograph, in nature, it's going to stick with you.
00:17Soren Goldsmith is scouting locations for his upcoming photography project in the coastal marshes of Wellfleet, Massachusetts.
00:24If you were to ask somebody what they think about a salt marsh, they probably wouldn't be able to tell you.
00:31They're often seen as sort of wasteland-y areas.
00:35So this marsh is one of my favorite marshes to go to because it's been preserved really, really well.
00:44I mean, look at this. If you don't see this every day, unless they know about it.
00:49The 20-year-old has been setting wildlife camera traps in a suburban Boston hometown since high school.
00:55But the nature of this particular environment required him to think outside the box.
01:01Salt marshes are intertidal environments, which means that half the day they're going to be dry,
01:07but the other half of the day the water is going to come up and cover this landscape.
01:13I had this idea of what if I could build an amphibious camera trap.
01:17It was around that same time that I ended up heading to the University of Wisconsin for engineering.
01:23And suddenly I had all these resources at my disposal.
01:26I had mechanical engineers, environmental engineers, civil engineers, computer engineers
01:31that were able to combine their expertises onto one project.
01:35Because a camera trap is a complex contraption.
01:42So yeah, this is the underwater amphibious camera trap.
01:45I call it IMPACT, which stands for Intertidal Motion Picture Activated Camera Trap.
01:50If it works right, it will go for a week in the marsh.
01:54But it always works. My inventions are always perfect.
01:58The salt marshes are very low elevation, practically at sea level.
02:07So the sea level rising only a little bit, like an inch, is a huge impact on that land.
02:13And as a result of this, salt marshes are being flooded more frequently and eroding more quickly than they can replenish.
02:20And you mix in this problem with human development.
02:24And a lot of projections are saying that marshes are going to disappear very quickly by the end of the century.
02:32But hope is not lost in this regard because we actually are lucky to have tools to deploy.
02:40Soren hopes his portraits of vulnerable animals will make people want to protect salt marshes.
02:45They're known to have some of the most biodiverse ecosystems.
02:51They also support coastal communities from eroding into the ocean.
02:55And they store a ton of carbon.
02:58So they're really important.
03:00Despite the dire projections about the fate of coastal habitats, he remains optimistic.
03:05Some of the stuff that I've been able to build 15 years ago would not have been possible.
03:10I'm lucky to be young right now when I have all of these cool technology and opportunities that I can leverage to tell my stories that older people might not have had.
03:21What would be even better than that is get my technology to people all over the world.
03:27Just the whole human understanding of ecosystems and wildlife would be greater.
03:32And I've found that in terms of these wondrous moments, being able to go out there and experience it and share it, it's wonderful.
03:42And I remember it.
03:44It kind of slows my life down and keeps me in the moment.
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