Mexico Deploys its Navy to Face its Latest Threat: Monster Seaweed

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;

From Barbados to Belize, Cancun to Tulum, a viny brown seaweed known as sargassum has invaded the Caribbean basin this year.

For Mexico, whose Caribbean coastline attracts more than 10 million visitors and generates $8 billion in tourism-related revenue a year, the arrival of sargassum became a cabinet-level crisis…

Read Full Article, The Washington Post

Stinking Mats of Seaweed Piling up on Caribbean Beaches, AP / ABC News (09-18-2015)

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

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

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…

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