A Giant Blob of Seaweed Is Heading to Florida

Key Facts

But scientists say that in the coming months, the blob — a tangled, buoyant, mass of a type of seaweed called sargassum — is expected to come ashore in Florida and elsewhere along the Gulf of Mexico.
But in 2011, scientists began to observe extraordinary accumulations of the seaweed extending in a belt from West Africa to the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico, according to a 2019 study.
The runoff from these sources helps to feed the bloom with nitrogen and phosphorus, said Brian Lapointe, a research professor at Florida Atlantic University, who has spent most of his career studying sargassum.
And in 2018, after a mass bloom that sprawled across about 5,500 miles in the Atlantic Ocean, doctors on the Caribbean islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique reported thousands of cases of “acute” exposure to hydrogen sulfide, according to a study published that year.