Stinking Mats of Seaweed Piling up on Caribbean Beaches

Fig.-10-giant-wrack-line-of-sargassum
Trinidad, West Indies. Giant wrack-line of Sargassum. Height here exceeded 2 m. The wall was definitely a barrier to nesting turtles. Captions: A Tale of Two Beaches: Tompire Bay, NE Trinidad; By John Weber, William Neal & Jeanette Arkle. Photo courtesy of: © Jeanette Arkle.

Excerpts;

The picture-perfect beaches and turquoise waters that people expect on their visits to the Caribbean are increasingly being fouled by mats of decaying seaweed that attract biting sand fleas and smell like rotten eggs…

Read Full Article, AP / ABC News

Beautiful Caribbean Beaches Now a Smelly Mess After Massive Seaweed Invasion, The Washington Post (08-14-2015)

Sargassum Inundates the Beaches of the Caribbean, Mission Blue, Sylvia Earle Alliance (10-31-2014)

Video: Algues Sargasses, Plage du Diamant- Martinique; DailyMotion Video (08-18-2015)
Sargassum is invading the beaches of Martinique island, French West Indies.

Green And Golden Seaweed Tides On The Rise, By Victor Smetacek & Adriana Zingone
Green, brown and red seaweeds lying on the beach are part and parcel of life in many coastal regions. The amount of beached seaweed biomass started to increase along the shores of industrialized countries in the 1970s, and by the 1990s had become a nuisance along many beaches when mass-stranding events of macroalgae became known as green tides…

Wave of Toxic Green Beaches, France; By Sharlene Pilkey
With beaches and coastlines all over the world already under attack from sea level rise, pollution, mining, driving, seawall construction and human development encroachment, another menace is mounting an assault…

A Tale of Two Beaches: Tompire Bay, NE Trinidad; By John Weber, William Neal & Jeanette Arkle

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