The sargassum belt that threatened to ruin the beaches of the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean this summer is in sharp decline and Florida scientists who prepare a monthly report on this natural phenomenon of seaweed blooms predict that in the coming months it will decrease further or stay the same.
The Oceanographic Optical Laboratory of the University of South Florida (USF) confirms in its latest report the significant decrease in sargassum in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea during June, while in the Central-Western Atlantic it continued to increase, although a slower pace.
“The increase in the Western Central Atlantic appears to have slowed and the amount of sargassum in the Gulf of Mexico will remain minimal and in the Caribbean will decrease or remain stable“, the report states.
This trend may continue in the next 2 to 3 months, “what should be a good news for residents of the Florida Keys and the east coast of Florida, as well as the western Caribbean Sea,” the scientists added.
In a statement to the Miami Herald, Chuanmin Hu, who is part of the USF research laboratory, stressed that although they had preceded a decline in sargassum in June, they didn’t expect it to “go down that much.”
USF scientists don’t expect levels of those kelp to recover this year, now that the plant’s spring growing season is over.
Regarding the reasons that have made the decrease in sargassum possible, he said that they may be due to the two tropical storms that occurred in June.
“Winds were stronger than usual” in the Gulf and Caribbean in June. Those winds can dissipate the sargassum or even sink it. That is our speculation,” she stressed.
Last April the laboratory had warned that the “great Atlantic sargassum belt”, which stretches from western Africa to the Gulf of Mexico with a width of 5,000 miles (about 8,000 kilometers), had reached a record weight for that time. of the year.
They calculated then that it weighed 13 million tons, but by June the wet weight had dropped to 9 million tons.
Globally, the decrease was not as significant as in the Gulf of Mexico, where, compared to May, the amount of sargassum fell by 75% in Junewell above laboratory expectations.
In the Caribbean Sea, the presence of red tide, a reddish-brown algae with a pestilential odor that does not encourage visiting the beaches where it accumulates, has also been reduced.
In contrast, it increased from May to June in the western central Atlantic, where sargassum aggregations have continued to move westward with prevailing currents and winds, although the rate of growth has slowed.
In the Caribbean most of the sargassum was found in June around the Lesser Antilles and along the southern coasts of Hispaniola (Dominican Republic and Haiti), Jamaica and Puerto Rico.
A trace amount of sargassum was found in the western Caribbean, including the waters off the Caribbean coast of Mexico, and very little sargassum was found in the Florida Straits and along the east coast of Florida.