Early July our group headed out on a trip to Santa Barbara to conduct field work in the Carpinteria Salt Marsh Reserve. The fieldwork was supported by our newly funded NSF grant “Deciphering the cryptic cycling of methane in sediments of a coastal wetland“. Sampling was ….very muddy…. and a lot of fun. We collected a good set of sediment cores from different stations along the salinity gradient from almost freshwater to hypersaline. Back in the lab at UCLA we will study the close relationship between methylotrophic methanogens and anaerobic methanotrophs.