The Beach Speaks

It's Seaweed Season and I'm Going to Cancun!

• Paige Friend

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How do you feel about seaweed?

I bet you could smell it as soon as you heard me say the word! 


When I think about the beaches here on the Atlantic coast, I never really considered that seaweed could be a problem.

I only notice it when it's washed up in small patches along the shore or in the ocean - but it’s never really gotten in the way of my enjoying the beach.

On the Gulf Coast, however, when a specific type of seaweed piles up on shore, it’s an entirely different story. For people wanting to enjoy a perfect beach day, it’s a smelly, unpleasant nuisance, and for some ocean life, it can be - deadly.
 
Scientists following the rapidly growing collection of this Sargassum didn’t consider it too much of a threat to the coastline until recently; the seaweed collection generally stayed in the Atlantic Ocean.

However, around March this year reports started flooding the newfeeds of what had now become an apocalyptic-sized 5,000-mile-wide patchwork of Sargassum clumps floating in the Atlantic - making its way toward Florida and other coastlines alongGulf of Mexico,  a giant blob of seaweed twice the width of the United States was now threatening to dump smelly and possibly harmful piles across the beaches.

I started to pay more attention to this massive “blob” of seaweed, thinking, “Wow, how awful it would be if that blob reached Cancun!”

If you're a frequent listener to the podcast, you can probably guess why I was suddenly all worried about Cancun. I was headed there in just a few weeks!

Listen to what I learned about seaweed season and what the beach in Cancun had to say about it while I was there.

I learned an important lesson about the beach: it isn't always what you want - but it's always what you need. 





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