The east coast of Florida has been threatened by an enormous “algae blob,” based on a number of information sources. The New York Post reported that “massive seaweed bloom starts washing ashore on Florida beaches” CNN warned that an alga bloom twice the dimensions of the U.S. is headed for Florida.
On the opposite hand, an oceanographer instructed reporters that this assertion is sensational in potential each method.
Dr. Yuyuan Xie makes use of satellites to review sargassum, a genus of enormous brown algae that floats round in island-like lots. “There is no ‘seaweed blob,’” Xie, who works within the Optical Oceanography Laboratory on the University of South Florida, instructed reporters. “But there is a 5,000-mile Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt,” which, Xie says, is comprised of lower than one-tenth of 1 p.c seaweed.
In different phrases, solely 0.1 p.c of the belt is made up of sargassum; the remaining 99.9 p.c is “sargassum free,” or just ocean water.
The east coast of Florida and the Florida Keys have solely been reached by solely a “tiny portion of the seaweed within the belt,” Xie mentioned, and it “is not moving toward Florida” like a fearsome monster.”
Sargassum seaweed belts should not technically a brand new phenomenon. According to a examine revealed within the peer-reviewed journal Science, Christopher Columbus was the primary to explain floating belts of Sargassum seaweed within the fifteenth century. According to specialists, these “mats” have been “limited” and “discontinuous” in latest centuries.
In 2011, nevertheless, they reappeared extra ceaselessly and extra densely, leading to an 8,850-kilometer-long bloom that stretched from West Africa throughout the Caribbean Sea to the Gulf of Mexico. According to the researchers, that is the most important macroalgal bloom ever recorded. “Such recurrent blooms may become the new normal.”
Xie and his colleagues use NASA satellites to measure the Sargassum algae inhabitants and observe its annual cycle. Xie described the phenomenon as “unusual” in comparison with a decade in the past as a result of “such a belt did not exist” However, this belt is typical, because the sargassum begins one other annual cycle in keeping with its exercise over the previous 5 years.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) notes that Sargassum is totally different from regular algae, that are usually held to the seafloor by root-like “holdfasts” In distinction, Sargassum floats on the ocean floor as a result of it doesn’t anchor itself to the underside.
These sargassum belts usually cowl miles of ocean floor and may function a floating habitat for creatures similar to sea turtles, chicken species, crabs, and shrimp. Even a sure species of frogfish, referred to as the “sargassum fish,” is discovered solely on this surroundings.