Brown seaweed bits have washed up on Florida’s beaches, as a raft of Sargassum crawls across the Caribbean.
“We’re calling it ‘Seaweed-ageddon’ because of the size and scope of this,” Space Coast Tourism Office executive director Peter Cranis told the outlet.
The clump this year is so big that it can be seen from far away.
Cranis stated that other areas have taken it off the beaches with equipment and put it in dump trucks. He also noted that it hasn’t affected central Florida as much as other areas.
Cranis believes it is a matter if the mass presents a significant problem, not “when”.
Sargassum is a genus of algal species that includes seaweed. The Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt is the name of the seaweed “blob”. It is twice as large as the United States.
“This is the new normal, and we’re going to have to adapt to it,” Brian Lapointe, an oceanographer at Florida Atlantic University who has studied seaweed for decades told Scientific American.
The red tide, a potentially more serious problem than the seaweed issue, has arrived earlier than usual this year. The red tide can lead to…
