A record amount of sargassum piled up against the across the Caribbean and nearby areas in May, and according to a new report, more is expected this month.
The report was published Monday by the University of South Florida's Optical Oceanography Lab.
The brown, prickly algae is suffocating shorelines from Puerto Rico to Guyana and beyond, disrupting tourism, killing wildlife and even releasing toxic gases that forced one school in the French-Caribbean island of Martinique to temporarily close.
An assistant research professor at the University of South Florida, Brian Barnes, said, the amount, 38 million metric tonnes, is the biggest quantity of algae observed across the Caribbean Sea, the western and eastern Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico, since scientists began studying the great Atlantic sargassum belt in 2011.
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