Record Amount Of Seaweed Hits Caribbean And Nearby Areas

1 day ago A new report says that a record 38 million metric tons of sargassum piled up across the Caribbean and nearby areas in May, with more expected this month. The brown prickly algae is suffocating shorelines from Puerto Rico to Guyana, disrupting tourism, killing wildlife and even releasing toxic gases that forced one school in the French Caribbean island of Martinique to temporarily close. It’s the biggest amount of algae spotted in the region since scientists began studying the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt in 2011, said Brian Barnes, an assistant research professor at the University of South Florida who worked on the report published Monday.