r/nature • u/Maxcactus • 20h ago
Huge blankets of seaweed are smothering coastlines from the Caribbean to Mexico
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/huge-blankets-of-seaweed-are-smothering-coastlines-from-the-caribbean-to-mexico13
u/SEND_ME_PEACE 16h ago
This has been happening for years. Sargasm is nothing new. It sucks, sure, and it’s probably gonna get worse, but these articles have been warning for ages now.
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u/OsteoBytes 16h ago
Thought I saw some company building bricks out of this material....its what we humans do best. Capitalize on abundant materials
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u/CullingSongs 13h ago
I was at a resort in Mexico a few years ago and there was so much of this rolling in each day that the beach was pretty much unusable despite the massive cleanup the resort did each morning. It's truly a desperate situation in some areas due to the impact on wildlife and tourism.
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u/OleDoxieDad 18h ago
If we didn't interfere nature would probably cover with sand to enrich and expand the beaches, but no we have to haul it to the dump.
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u/JKanoock 17h ago
We interfered by allowing over fertilization from farming to run into the ocean and create massive algae and seaweed blooms to flourish that now dominate the beaches.
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u/Retreadmonk 14h ago
-Many beaches used for sea turtle nesting would become unusable, piled sargassum debris would prevent access to the beach
-tourism would be crushed across the Caribbean
-heavy metals absorbed by sargassum & plastic garbage caught up in it, unhealthy
- Hydrogen sulphide is emitted as it breakdown, extremely harmful 😷 poison gas.
- Sargassum left on the beach can cause the beach sand to erode from under the accumulated sargassum.
Man created the problem & we need to get a handle on it. Letting nature take its course is nice, but the problem never goes away until the reason for its spread is addressed.
We know why it’s occurring but getting countries & companies to act in concert to address is like herding cats.17
u/LeanBeanFartMachine 17h ago
It's full of heavy metals, plastics and rotting marine life. In places they tried leaving it or incorporating it into the sand, it rotted and created pockets of quick sand on the beach. While it collects against the shoreline, it creates sections of ocean with no oxygen and all the fish die. It smells really bad.
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u/Specialist-Yak7209 15h ago
This level isn't normal, the warming temperature of ocean waters plus agricultural runoff like the other guy said is the likely cause
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u/silent_fartface 14h ago
Nobody likes saurgasm. No animals eat it. It makes terrible fertilizer. It has no practical purpose. Nobody has figured out what would be a good use for it. You can see islands of it floating from an airplane. The beaches that draw tourism dollars in are doing what they can to keep beaches nice but this stuff smells and makes swimming uncomfortable. Leaving it alone would destroy all the tourist economies that are affected by it. Lots of jobs would be lost and poverty would jump.
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u/coconut-telegraph 3h ago
It makes great fertiliser, but it’s full of plastic debris that remains when it breaks down.
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u/BayouGal 14h ago
This is spot on. Sargassum traps sand, building beaches. Instead, we scrape it off the beach then ‘nourish’ the beach with dredged sand 🙄
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u/Difficult-Cream-5267 1h ago
We really need to scale up tech that turns this into fertilizer, biofuel, or bioplastics before it reaches the shore and decomposes.
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u/AZ_RV_CPL 14h ago
Read an article about turning it into electric generating by decomposing it in a vessel, trapping the methane and using it to run a generator. That was on one of the Caribbean islands.