What do we know about the huge mass of seaweed approaching the Caribbean?

21-03-23

A huge mass of seaweed originating in the Atlantic is heading towards Florida and other coasts in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean, where it could litter beaches with foul-smelling and potentially deadly piles, and severely disrupt the region's tourism industry.

In the Atlantic, a type of seaweed known as sargassum has been accumulating rapidly since 2011, and scientists have been monitoring the phenomenon ever since. At more than five thousand nautical miles long, from the coast of Africa to the Gulf of Mexico, this year's mass of sargassum may be the longest ever recorded.

Dr Brian Lapointe, a researcher at Florida Atlantic University's Harbor Branch Oceanographic Center, predicts that the seaweed will be abundant on Florida's beaches by July, when the blob will continue to move westward into the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico this summer.

Throughout December and January, the sargassum bloom doubled in size, according to Lapointe. "It was bigger in January than it has ever been since this new sargassum growth region started in 2011," Lapointe told Rosemary Church.

"This is a completely new oceanographic phenomenon that is creating such a problem - a catastrophic problem - for tourism in the Caribbean region, where it is piling up on beaches up to 5 or 6 feet deep," Lapointe added.

He noted that in Barbados, local people were using "1,600 dump trucks a day to clean the beaches of this seaweed and make them suitable for tourists and beach recreation".