FL - Meet the sargassum belt, a 5,000-mile-long snake of seaweed nearing the Gulf of Mexico
It stretches over 5,000 miles. It weighs over 10 million tons. And it's circling around the Gulf of Mexico and the mid-Atlantic, where the right combination of currents and wind could push it ashore.
If you haven't heard of the great Atlantic sargassum belt, or even if you have, chances are high that you'll see it pop into your news feed at least once this summer. After a decade of record-breaking blooms, 2023's sargassum mass is again shaping up to cause headaches (literally and figuratively) for beachside towns and tourists.
Here's what you need to know.
What exactly is the sargassum belt?
Sargassum is a type of leafy, rootless and buoyant algae that bunch up in islands and floats around the ocean.
In the open sea, healthy patches of sargassum can soak up carbon dioxide and serve as a critical habitat for fish, crabs, shrimp, turtles and birds.
But if sargassum moves closer to the coast, the seaweed can wreak havoc on local ecosystems, smothering coral reefs and altering the water's pH balance. Once ashore, clumps of sargassum can choke local economies by closing tourism sites, cutting off marinas and constricting fishing yields.
Sargassum begins to rot after about 48 hours on land, releasing irritants like hydrogen sulfide, a hazard to anyone with respiratory issues like asthma. Oh, and the resulting smell resembles manure or rotten eggs — not a great spring break aroma.
It used to be that sargassum rafts were disparate, sporadic bodies, causing little disruption to beach-going.
But scientists noticed a change in sargassum levels in 2011, when masses of the seaweed multiplied, gaining in density and size, becoming so big they were captured on satellite images.
__________________________
Read also
A 5,000-mile-wide blob of seaweed is headed for Florida, threatening tourism across the Caribbean, CNN / March 16, 2023
_________________________
Today, the patches comprise a 5,500-mile-long, 10 million-ton belt that circulates annually, starting near West Africa and snaking through the Gulf of Mexico back into the Atlantic.
More than double the width of the contiguous U.S., the mass fluctuates in size from month to month, with the high point generally landing in the summer.
"The low season of the cycle is now higher than the high point of the cycle five or six years ago," says Brian Barnes, a researcher with the University of South Florida's College of Marine Science.
"What we thought was just a massive bloom has only gotten bigger and bigger and bigger each year," Barnes adds.
What's behind these monster blooms?
The exact drivers of the growth are still a bit "shrouded in mystery," says Brian Lapointe, a research professor with Florida Atlantic University, who's been studying sargassum for over 40 years.
His hypothesis is that it has to do with how humans are altering the nitrogen cycle. We're using more fertilizer, burning biomass, cutting down forests and increasing wastewater from cities, all of which sends ammonium, nitrate and phosphate down major river systems.
Those elevated nutrients then shoot out over the surface of the ocean, acting as a fertilizer for sargassum patches.
"What we've found in studying these plants over the last four decades is that the ratio [of phosphate to nitrogen] is going up, and that's exactly what's happening to all these major river systems," Lapointe said. "It's almost like sargassum is a barometer for how global nitrogen levels are changing."
Cleaning up major rivers from the Mississippi to the Orinoco would be the best step for mitigating excessive sargassum bloom, Lapointe says.
But in the meantime, the blooms continue to get bigger and bigger. Barnes and Lapointe both say that this year is already on track to break records.
What's happening with this year's bloom?
The University of South Florida's Optical Oceanography Lab, which tracks the mass using NASA satellite imagery, the latest bloom has already doubled every month from November to January.
And, thanks to ocean currents, the belt is continuing to migrate westward, threatening beaches along the Florida Keys, along with Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula and the eastern Caribbean.
An estimated 200 tons of sargassum already began washing up on beaches along the Yucatán Peninsula earlier this month, spurring local authorities to jump into cleanup operations.
