John Yang:
It sounds like science fiction. A 5,000 mile long belt of seaweed mitt weighing more than 11 million tons is sloshing around to the Atlantic Ocean. When some of it reaches Florida, it threatens to wreak havoc in the coastal waters and on the beaches, but it is very real. It’s called The Great Atlantic Sargassum belt, so big it can be seen from space spanning the tropical Atlantic from West Africa to the Caribbean.
Earlier I talked with Ajit Subramaniam, an oceanographer at Columbia University’s Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory.
Ajit Subramaniam, Oceanographer at Columbia University’s Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory: So I guess it was a seaweed that grows entirely on the surface of the ocean it has never attached to land, and the Sargasso Sea is called the Sargasso Sea because of the prevalence of Sargassum in the northern part.
I guess Sunbelt is a new population of Sargassum that seems to have developed since about 2011. We have been seeing there and satellite imagery before that. And then we saw this explosion of a popular new population about them. But seems to basically slosh back and forth between the coast of West Africa and the Yucatan, a Mexican coast, on the other side of the Caribbean, on an annual basis.
