By: Staff Writer
April 4, 2023
A Sargassum blob twice the width of The US is already washing up on shores in the Caribbean as it makes its way up the Caribbean Sea towards the Gulf of Mexico and South Florida.
The smelly and unsightly seaweed is already creating angst for travelers as they rethink their summer vacation plans in the Sun, Sand and Sea.
The Scientific American reports that “bucketloads” of the algae are washing up on beaches on the eastern coast of Florida already and earlier in the year than usual, raising scientists’ concerns for what coming months will bring.
The seaweed is made up of algal species in the genus Sargassum. These species grow as a mat of glops of algae that stay afloat via little air-filled sacs attached to leafy structures. The algae form a belt between the Caribbean and West Africa in the Sargasso Sea in the North Atlantic Ocean and then ride the currents west. Scientists say that reports of a massive blob of seaweed slamming into coastlines are overblown because the Sargassum algae are scattered across the ocean, and much of the seaweed will never reach the coast’s sandy shores. But in recent years researchers have generally seen larger so-called Sargassum blooms. And once the seaweed begins washing up on beaches and rotting, it can cause serious problems, local communities say.
The naturally occurring brown seaweed floats freely on the ocean’s surface, extending as deep as 10 feet below the surface, and sometimes makes its way to shore with currents and wind.
“It’s a floating brown macroalgae, related to kelp, but it’s always afloat, never attached to the bottom,” explains Brian Barnes, an expert on marine sciences and assistant professor at the University of South Florida, which collects data on sargassum blooms in the Caribbean Sea.
Sargassum is composed of gas-filled structures that look like berries called pneumatocysts that keep it buoyant.
Visible from outer space, the Great Sargassum Belt that’s making headlines of late is a 13-million ton mass that stretches 5,000 miles long and 300 miles wide in an area of the Atlantic Ocean between the Gulf of Mexico and the coast of West Africa.
There have been efforts to turn the algae into a biomass experiment for liquid fertilizer for farmers and a company in Barbados can process up to four tonnes of the algae per day.
Until and when there is a useful purpose for the sargassum, Caribbean beaches will have to contend with the unsightly remains of them washing up on shorelines.