'Even if it’s just out in coastal waters, it can block intake valves for things like power plants or desalination plants, marinas can get completely inundated and boats can’t navigate through.'
A raft of brown-colored seaweed in the Atlantic Ocean is so vast it can be seen from space.sargassumIn open water, these giant mats of algae are mostly harmless and even have some benefits, including serving as a habitat for certain fish and crustaceans and absorbing carbon dioxide. But ocean currents are pushing sargassum west, causing hundreds of tons of seaweed to wash up on beaches across the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico.
"It’s incredible," said Brian LaPointe, a research professor at Florida Atlantic University’s Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute."What we’re seeing in the satellite imagery does not bode well for a clean beach year." Other impacts to human health are coming into focus. As the seaweed rots, it releases hydrogen sulfide, which can cause respiratory problems for tourists and residents in the vicinity, LaPointe said.
"Before 2011, it was there but we couldn’t observe it with satellites because it wasn’t dense enough," Barnes said."Since then, it has just exploded and we now see these huge aggregations."estimated that more than 20 million metric tons of sargassum blanketed the Atlantic in what has been nicknamed the"Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt."
"You have the Congo, the Amazon, the Orinoco, the Mississippi — the largest rivers on the planet, which have been affected by things like deforestation, increasing fertilizer use and burning biomass," LaPointe said."All of that is increasing the nitrogen concentrations in these rivers and so we’re now seeing these blooms as kind of a manifestation of the changing nutrient cycles on our planet.
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