What Is Sargassum? Everything Travelers Need to Know

Garrett Gardner

A large “seaweed blob” that is section of the Excellent Sargassum Belt is building headlines and could have seashore goers wondering if their impending sand-loaded getaways alongside the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean in the Caribbean and Florida might be plagued with a layer of rotting, stinking algae.

At the get started of this 12 months, University of South Florida experts released information demonstrating that the volume of seaweed in the Terrific Sargassum Belt—a 5,000-mile-extensive spot containing a free assortment of patches of the brown floating seaweed, positioned between West Africa and the Gulf of Mexico—had doubled in sizing in two consecutive months (December 2022 and all over again in January 2023).

To far better realize what the swiftly increasing mass of seaweed will suggest for some of our favored seashore locations in the coming months, we arrived at out to some professionals.

What is sargassum?

Prospects are if you have at any time been on a beach front lapped by the Atlantic Ocean or Gulf of Mexico, you’ve now encountered sargassum, in whatsoever little amount, alongside the shoreline or in the h2o.

The naturally taking place brown seaweed floats freely on the ocean’s surface, extending as deep as 10 ft underneath the area, and sometimes helps make its way to shore with currents and wind.

“It’s a floating brown macroalgae, linked to kelp, but it’s normally afloat, in no way hooked up to the bottom,” points out Brian Barnes, an expert on maritime sciences and assistant professor at the University of South Florida, which collects information on sargassum blooms in the Caribbean Sea.

Sargassum is composed of gas-filled structures that glance like berries termed pneumatocysts that maintain it buoyant.

Noticeable from outer house, the Good Sargassum Belt which is making headlines of late is a 13-million ton mass that stretches 5,000 miles very long and 300 miles wide in an region of the Atlantic Ocean among the Gulf of Mexico and the coastline of West Africa.

“It’s a superior thing when it’s out offshore,” claims Brian LaPointe, a investigation professor with Florida Atlantic College Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute in Fort Pierce, Florida. “Sargassum gives habitat for hundreds of species and invertebrates and even endangered sea turtles, supporting pelagic fisheries like mahi mahi and other fish that feed on prey objects.” (Pelagic fish are fish that dwell and eat in the vicinity of the water’s surface).

“It’s when it arrives ashore in mass, that is when it becomes a problem,” LaPointe says about the seaweed.

large amounts of sargassum on a beach

Sargassum can emit a robust, rotten egg-like odor when it decomposes on shore.

Can you swim in the h2o when there is sargassum existing?

Based on how thick it is, swimming in water the place sargassum is existing may well demand pushing it out of the way to clear a route. And sargassum can truly feel scratchy, type of like a loofah sponge, when it rubs up towards you (dolphins have been reported to play with sargassum and may possibly even use it to scratch them selves, in accordance to the Wild Dolphin Task). But for people, there can be some disagreeable ailments affiliated with swimming exactly where sargassum is plentiful, suggests LaPointe.

“You can swim in the water if there is sargassum and men and women do, but I have viewed some reviews of sea lice associated with sargassum in water with massive mats of it floating all over,” he claims, referring to small jellyfish larvae, which can induce the pores and skin to erupt in a crimson, itchy rash.

On top of that, “there are some hazards of stinging organisms to be knowledgeable of,” LaPointe suggests, referring to jellyfish that can also usually be existing among the sargassum.

The odor of sargassum—which can smell like rotten eggs when it decomposes due to the manufacturing of the hydrogen sulfide gas produced—can be off putting, and LaPointe notes that there have been studies of respiratory troubles in parts with massive amounts of decomposing sargassum on the shore owing to the hydrogen sulfide produced.

Why is there so much sargassum ideal now?

Barnes suggests that researchers are at present finding out why there is so substantially sargassum ideal now. From his standpoint, he says it comes down to present disorders remaining suitable for it to expand.

“Just like land vegetation, you want the appropriate light surroundings, the ideal temperature,” for growth, he suggests, as properly as a seed (the seed in this circumstance is the inhabitants of sargassum that’s currently out in the Great Sargassum Belt). Nutrition mounting from the ocean depths or from rivers flowing into the area act as fertilizers, including to the perfect conditions for development.

LaPointe suggests the scale of the existing bloom is “all about the vitamins and minerals.”

“The additional you feed it, the larger it will get,” he says, introducing that there’s evidence that nutrient runoff (in the type of nitrogen and phosphorus from human activities and resources this sort of as fertilizers, wastewater, vehicle exhaust, and animal waste) from rivers—including the Mississippi River, Amazon River and the Congo River—are feeding sargassum blooms all along the Atlantic Basin.

Which beach locations and places will be most afflicted by the developing sargassum belt?

Circumstances are presently favorable for the algae’s development throughout the overall sargassum belt, with the most growth going on in the eastern Atlantic. “This is not the to start with time we’ve observed major blooms,” Barnes suggests, pointing to report blooms in 2018 and 2022. Nonetheless, there had been no this sort of significant blooms prior to 2011, he adds, declaring there is no clear clarification for why.

All of the islands in the Caribbean are in the focus on zone for where by sargassum may well wash shore, he suggests, with the Southern Lesser Antilles (which consists of islands these kinds of as Aruba, Bonaire, Curaçao, Margarita Island, and Trinidad and Tobago) most likely to be slightly a lot less impacted than elsewhere in the Caribbean. “But that’s not to say they’ll see no affect,” he suggests of those destinations.

Other parts in the sargassum belt’s goal zone contain the Yucatan (on the Gulf of Mexico coasts of Belize and Mexico), the Gulf of Mexico (from Florida’s panhandle west into Texas) and Southeast Florida, from the Florida Keys northwest to around Fort Pierce, claims Barnes.

“Despite the actuality that Florida has formerly been strike very difficult, sargassum is a considerably greater problem in the Caribbean than Florida,” he claims. “That’s accurate this yr, so far, and in preceding a long time.” The cause why the problem looms bigger in the Caribbean is owing to currents there that produce sargassum to the location in more abundance and maintain it circulating there for for a longer period.

“We just can’t predict what’s heading to take place this summer time, but in earlier yrs Mexico has been impacted pretty closely, as well as the Eastern Caribbean, such as places like Barbados and Martinique,” claims LaPointe.

LaPointe says it is significant to try to remember, far too, that exactly where sargassum accumulates is extremely variable.

“It can occur in on one day with sturdy winds and pile up, and the subsequent working day the wind could shift and currents can improve and will carry this things offshore,” he says.

Is there just about anything places and beachfront hotels and resorts can do to mitigate the issue?

Keeping sargassum at bay from a seaside wherever it is identified to wash ashore is like battling a mounting tide. And scenes of staff pitchforking and shoveling piles of seaweed into waiting wheelbarrows all over the clock have, sad to say, become a to some degree typical oceanfront backdrop in new decades at beach locations in preferred heat-weather places like Playa del Carmen and Tulum in Mexico and Barbados in the Caribbean.

Apart from eliminating what washes ashore as it arrives, Barnes claims a resort may possibly look at putting in a floating growth offshore (typically made of PVC and deployed parallel to the shoreline) with the goal of preventing sargassum from coming ashore. But all over again, it signifies a modest measure from a monumental task.

Booms are not 100 percent efficient, he claims, and can only be implemented in somewhat tiny parts in the context of the greater bloom. Mainly because booms just cannot be infinitely lengthy, sargassum can seep in at their finishes and still make its way to the sand.

“They perform, but not perfectly,” Barnes claims.

1 spot that’s probable to be ideal on a sunny working day no subject what the Wonderful Sargassum Belt and ocean currents and winds are accomplishing, on the other hand? That is your hotel pool, preferably a person with ocean views.

Right after all, it under no circumstances hurts to have a beach day backup strategy.

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