The University of South Florida's Optical Oceanography Lab, which tracks the mass using NASA satellite imagery, the latest bloom has already doubled every month from November to January.Īnd, thanks to ocean currents, the belt is continuing to migrate westward, threatening beaches along the Florida Keys, along with Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula and the eastern Caribbean.Īn estimated 200 tons of sargassum already began washing up on beaches along the Yucatán Peninsula earlier this month, spurring local authorities to jump into cleanup operations.

Barnes and Lapointe both say that this year is already on track to break records. 'It's almost like sargassum is a barometer for how global nitrogen levels are changing.'Ĭleaning up major rivers from the Mississippi to the Orinoco would be the best step for mitigating excessive sargassum bloom, Lapointe says.īut in the meantime, the blooms continue to get bigger and bigger. 'What we've found in studying these plants over the last four decades is that the ratio is going up, and that's exactly what's happening to all these major river systems,' Lapointe said. Those elevated nutrients then shoot out over the surface of the ocean, acting as a fertilizer for sargassum patches. In the open sea, healthy patches of sargassum can soak up carbon dioxide and serve as a critical habitat for fish, crabs, shrimp, turtles and birds. Sargassum is a type of leafy, rootless and buoyant algae that bunch up in islands and floats around the ocean.

After a decade of record-breaking blooms, 2023's sargassum mass is again shaping up to cause headaches (literally and figuratively) for beachside towns and tourists. If you haven't heard of the great Atlantic sargassum belt, or even if you have, chances are high that you'll see it pop into your news feed at least once this summer.

And it's circling around the Gulf of Mexico and the mid-Atlantic, where the right combination of currents and wind could push it ashore. Researchers expect this year will bring another massive bloom, choking local ecosystems and tourism economies. People remove Sargassum in Playa del Carmen, Mexico, in April, 2022.

Maya 2022 keygen