SPEYSIDE on the island of Tobago has taken a direct hit. So have Skeete’s Bay, Bathsheba and other beaches on the southern and eastern coasts of Barbados. Cancún, a Mexican resort, has been struck
The bombardment takes the form of globs of sargassum seaweed which have landed on Caribbean beaches this year, forming piles that are sometimes metres deep. They emit a rotten-egg stench when they decompose, ruining holidays for anyone with a sense of smell. Hilary Beckles, the vice-chancellor of the University of the West Indies, calls it “the greatest single threat to the Caribbean economy I can imagine.”
There are more than 100 species of sargassum, possibly named after a Portuguese water flower. S. natans and S. fluitans spend their lives afloat and normally bother nobody. Buoyed by gas-filled bladders, they drift from nutrient-rich waters in the Gulf of Mexico into the Sargasso Sea.
The infestations plaguing paradise originate further south, in the equatorial Atlantic, between Brazil and Nigeria. Teardrop-shaped agglomerations, up to four miles long and half a mile across, drift west, making landfall on east- and south-facing Caribbean beaches. In Barbados tourists have been bused from southern beaches to western ones.
Marine biologists are not sure why sargassum started showing up so far from its native waters around four years ago. The rising temperature of ocean surface water caused by global warming may be partly responsible. So, too, may be nutrient-rich run-off from land newly deforested in the Amazon for farming.
So far, Caribbean resorts have reported little decline in tourism, but the region’s officials are racking their brains for solutions before that happens. They have yet to find any. A minister from the island state of St Vincent and the Grenadines suggests intercepting the weed with floating booms. That would be expensive: a barrier just 300 metres (1,000 feet) long would cost $80,000. Construction equipment can get rid of the stuff, but scoops up too much sand.
NASA tracks the clumps in the ocean by satellite, the basis for a system that can provide early warning of inundations. That will not help until a way is found to divert the weed. But it might spare holidaymakers unpleasant surprises.