This past March, scientists found that the amount of a floating brown seaweed known as Sargassum was the largest of any on record for that month.
The Sargassum stretched from Africa’s west coast to the Gulf of Mexico and is known as the “Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt.”
The bloom has developed nearly every spring and summer since 2011, according to NASA.
Researchers from the University of South Florida measured last March’s Sargassum belt to be around 13 million tons.
Brian Barnes, a marine scientist at the Optical Oceanography Laboratory at USF, said:
“So far this year, record high Sargassum abundance is mostly in the central East Atlantic. But in other parts of the Atlantic and Caribbean, its abundance is still high—in the 75th percentile of measurements made between 2011 and 2022.”
Check out the whole story on NASA’s website.
