Coastal communities spending millions to fight onslaught of seaweed

Beach towns along the Atlantic Ocean are adjusting to large amounts of seaweed that floats onto their beaches each summer. It's sargassum season.

Transcript

MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:

Lots and lots of seaweed is washing up on Florida beaches, and Florida communities are spending millions of dollars to deal with it. Reshma Kirpalani reports.

RESHMA KIRPALANI: The sound of the ocean...

(SOUNDBITE OF OCEAN WAVES CRASHING)

KIRPALANI: ...Is now accompanied by the sound of tractors on Miami Beach.

(SOUNDBITE OF TRACTORS RUNNING)

KIRPALANI: They're scooping up big piles of a smelly, brown seaweed called sargassum.

MARCO PIEROBON: These guys, the whole morning, is coming and going trying to clean up the beach, but there's a lot. You know, it's kind of ugly.

KIRPALANI: That's Marco Pierbon, a tourist from Argentina. He visits Miami once a year on his way up to Orlando for a volleyball tournament. He remembers seeing a lot of sargassum last year.

PIEROBON: But I think this year is worse.

KIRPALANI: Researchers like Chuanmin Hu agree. He's a professor of oceanography at the University of South Florida who tracks sargassum using NASA satellite data. And he said, so far in the Gulf of Mexico...

CHUANMIN HU: What we have observed was a record amount of sargassum compared to history for the same time of year.

KIRPALANI: And June marked the second-highest year for sargassum in the entire Atlantic Ocean. Sargassum is a natural habitat for a lot of marine life. Originally, it was found in a region in the Atlantic Ocean called the Sargasso Sea, but in recent years, it's been growing and shifting. Massive amounts are now stretching from West Africa to the Gulf of Mexico.

HU: Actually, I coined the name. I called this a Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt.

KIRPALANI: Each year, pieces of that sargassum belt break off. Ocean currents carry them to the Caribbean and up Florida's east coast. This year, some have even been spotted as far north as North Carolina. Hu says that global warming plays a role.

HU: The ocean has warmed on an average .1 or .2 degree per decade. You think, well, that's pretty small, right? But for plants, this is a lot.

KIRPALANI: The rotten egg smell and seaweed-covered sand can ruin vacations. Sasha Ravn lives in New Zealand. She's visited Miami Beach with her daughter since 2021, but this year...

SASHA RAVN: Why would I come to swim and spend time on the beach if there's all this seaweed? There's no reason.

KIRPALANI: If nothing is done to clean up the sargassum, Florida could see billions in economic losses across tourism, recreation and fisheries, says Di Jin. He's with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, where he studied the impact of sargassum. Fewer tourists, he says, leads to emptier restaurants and hotels.

DI JIN: So you have this economy-wide ripple effect.

KIRPALANI: That's why Miami-Dade County spends millions of dollars dealing with the stinky, brown seaweed, but only once it reaches its beaches. They can't touch it while it's in the ocean.

CHRIS BUMPUS: And that's because the waters are either federally regulated or state regulated.

KIRPALANI: That's Chris Bumpus with the county's parks department. He says that they're not allowed to put up barriers to keep sargassum from coming to shore.

(SOUNDBITE OF TRACTORS RUNNING)

KIRPALANI: Back on Miami Beach, six hours into sargassum removal, tractors have cleared several blocks, but a thin ribbon of brown seaweed still traces the shoreline. Pierobon, the Argentinian tourist, surveys the sand.

PIEROBON: The whole beach - it's really dusty with the sargassum. You can't go to the sea right now because it's pretty ugly, right?

KIRPALANI: He looks out into the ocean, where jewel-toned, emerald water is dotted with floating patches of brown seaweed ready to come ashore.

For NPR News, I'm Reshma Kirpalani in Miami Beach.

(SOUNDBITE OF MAZZY STAR SONG, "FADE INTO YOU") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.