The Continent-Sized Algae Blob That’s Coming for Florida
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 30 มี.ค. 2023
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Video written by Amy Muller
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Y’know until now I always assumed all the seaweed on the beach was common all around the world and not just the Caribbean. Weirdly enough sargassum is nostalgic for me since I spent a lot of time at the beach as a kid
Agreed! As someone from south Florida I was just thinking it was so normal.
same here
Me too, though i lived in Wales so it was a different seaweed where you might find a rope
It is, to some extent, though generally not nearly as much. Some seaweed doesn't rot so easily though, it dries out and blows away instead which is much less of a problem.
@Caleb's Unremarkable TH-cam Channel no most places on earth are nicer than the Great Lakes area so it’s not like that everywhere
Sam just clowning on random fish always makes my day.
comment bot
comment bot
Sam clowning on one direction always makes my day.
Lol same
How dare you call Zayn a "random fish"!
The middle of the Atlantic ocean used to be called the Sargasso Sea. Spiralling currents kept massive blobs of the stuff pretty densely packed a given area. They were thick enough that sailing ships would slowed or stranded in the mess.
This is fact. It was labelled in old maps and people knew to stay clear of the area because of it.
Negative: it’s the westernmost part. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sargasso_Sea and I am pretty sure that the Bermuda Triangle myth has something to do with Sargassum.
Apparently it has more to do with the lack of wind than the sargassum
Pi Ta explain the planes then
@@User31129 see the Bermuda triangle is an area that scientist have found has huge methane deposits that bubble up. Which as you can guess will cause planes to drop and the bubbles can cause ships to sink
Sam is keeping the entire stock footage industry in business
We finally found it: the industry Millenials are breathing new life into
@@Giantcrabz And avocado farming. Though that one had been on the rise for a while.
I'm so glad Sam made a joke about bricks again. I was afraid something was wrong.
rudy l is a comment bot!!! don’t like
@@rainstrip. Two comments do not a bot make
@@rainstrip. why? Her channel doesn’t look suspicious (no links, weird names, or odd videos) and the comments are harmless and (from what i found) are original, and she doesn’t have many subscribers, what is your point?
@@Ph1syc "This is the clip you've been waiting for!" Is a comment that only bots make. (Unless Ph1syc is also a bot, and I've been tricked.)
@@Rougesteelproject yeah i know kitty V is a bot but rudy didnt comment that
I actually live in Jamaica, and yeah, the seaweed has been choking up all the beaches. People here try to deal with it by collecting it and selling it to be used as fertilizer.
That what I was thinking. This would make amazing fertilizer to compost. Full of great nutrients for plants.
Flowers yes but maybe keep away from anything you plan to eat, on account of all the arsenic in it
@@elslick also, probably arsenic?
sorry, I meant "blobably"
How do you compost it and use it as fertilizer? Since it grows in the sea I assumed it would be pretty salty, and salt kills plants.
you should be smoking the weed man
Sargassum has been horrible in Puerto Aventura, MX for the last 10 years. It smells so bad. It's feet deep all along the coast. It's so hard to keep up with . We actually have a Sargassum Report that goes out to the are daily.
Sargassum has always been around, but it usually didn't appear until May through June. Now it starts in February.
Definitely sounds like a cheap resource that should be used. Literally washes up on the beach!
Wonder why it contains so much arsenic though. Okay googled it, and that species hijki, has three times the allowed amount of arsenic for human consumption! Yet heating it at 90c for five minutes can get rid of 33 to 80% of it.
We really screwed up the ocean with inorganic arsenic and mercury.
Was there a few weeks ago and it was pretty bad. They had people w shovels scooping it off beach
@@dianapennepacker6854 The law of conservation of matter applies here though. You might remove 80% of the arsenic from the sargassum, but it has to go somewhere -- most likely into the air we breathe.
make actual bricks?
@Michelle Wallace or the broth of the dish do your still eating it. Can be converted to a higher boiling point salt depending on dish ingredients
I have spent the past 3-4 months working on a research paper about another species of algae that fucks with Florida routinely, just recently finished my rough draft, and the moment I saw this I had a Vietnam-style flashback to it
You wrote a research paper about Trump? Are you going to do another about DeSantis?
@@thePronto On behalf of algae, I feel insulted to be compared with such vile creatures.
@@theProntoNo, this algae isn't actively malicious
(It's called Karenia brevis btw if anyone cares)
@@Vanq22114 Does it just want to speak with the manager?
@@theProntocringe
Seaweed blob can only be stopped by one person... florida man needs to finally rise to glory.
Tiger King we need you again
He is 2 busy running for president.
Frick! You beat me to it.
I appreciate the amount of sargastic humour in this video.
It wasn't sargassum, but a similar seaplant blob on a French beach killed a horse with hydrogen sulfide poisoning, so the bad egg smell is the least of your worries. Another fun fact: at high levels of hydrogen sulfide, the smell goes away, so when the smell stops, the problem either got better.... or worse. Happy beach holidays!
Right? When he said h2s I was like "Oh, so THAT'S why this is such a big concern."
My home town is notorious for having a large amount of algae wash up on the the beaches every summer and rot, leaving a distinct and awful smell all along the waterfront all summer. The algae is so voluminous they've used the city's bay to test algae harvesters. Strangely, in later years when I return to visit home, it becomes a nostalgic smell. It's a lot like Ankh-Morpork.
Love the reference 😆
I thought sargasm was the uncontrolable outburst of laughter after breaking character from a sarcastic joke.
Sargassum moment
Peak Sargassum hours
"you guys are gonna love this, bricks!" and guess what sam I did actually love that
Now he single-handedly destroyed the 2023 beach tourism in the Caribbean😂
Keep in mind there's thousands of islands in the Pacific that can make good alternatives.
there’s tons of beautiful beaches that ain’t stopping me
I was there in February and it was deserted. Almost creepily so. And yes, there was sargassum EVERYWHERE.
Good. Let the seashores recover for a little bit without drunk assholes and tourists dumping trash everywhere
Thank god someone’s trying to put an end to Florida
*sea level rise has entered the chat*
@@Thrlta It's been decades and we're still waiting.
As a Floridian, I agree.
Yes, so everyone can stop moving here now...
It would be more efficient, but the majority of our resources are directed towards Ohio. Shutting down that hell entrance is more important rn than sea weed with guns.
This area used to be called The Sargasso Sea.
The beach I surf in SoCal is often buried in sea kelp that has detached from the sea bed, and a few years ago it was stacked up about 4 feet high on the beach.
Fun fact: the game Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri has a feature known as New Sargasso, referencing the Sargasso Sea, which is a region of the Atlantic Ocean which has a large amount of Sargassum in it due to a massive circular current that tends to keep it there. In the game, it's a gigantic blob of sea fungus with 4 Unity Pods in the middle, which is almost guaranteed to have one of those pods plant a bunch of Kelp in the middle of it that will slowly destroy the blob.
Waiting on an Alpha Centauri remake, but also not sure it can ever be improved on
wow, someone who might know something for a change!
Bravo to the animation team, they went hard on this one
they went *what* this one?
The worst part of sargassum is probably the smell, it's absolutely revolting.
I was on a cruise. And the sheer amount of the stuff that was there… it’s crazy
Thoughts and prayers to the blob, may it emerge victorious inshallah.
Also may the middle eastern famine emerge victorious inshallah
😂
I am always impressed by how you can dumb something down just enough to get people to NOT realize that they had just been taught something.
"Heh heh...that was funny.....Hey...wait....why do I know what sargassum is ?....Heh heh...sargassum....Algae farts...heh heh...."
dumb as F
It's about time this channel got back on track. Lot of non brick facts to fast forward thru tho.
Yeah the filler episodes have been getting out of hand recently. I even almost forgot about the brick arc entirely
This video was very informative. I learned so much about One Direction!
With something THAT wide and big, Id imagine it to be atleast a mountain's weight
Rock is notoriously denser than floating plant matter.
notoriously, pumice is the only notorious rock that *does* float in water. this increases it's notoriousness by notoriously not doing the notorious thing that makes the category (rocks!) notorious in the first place.
@@DraconianEmpath this comment should be notorious my guy
@@johnladuke6475 Yeah but like, the Eiffel Tower is pretty damn tiny compared to _the entire Carribbean_
I was convinced this comment would end with a "your mum" joke
It’s all fun and games until Ron DeSantis puts all the Sargassum on a plane and ships it off to Martha’s Vineyard!
Thanks! My wife and I were staring on that from a recent cruise from FL to the Yucatan with bewilderment. Now we know :-D
The mix of animation and stock image looks great!
They fertilise the (potato) fields with that thing where I come from! Makes the food taste amazing.
Arsenic though. If you must use it as fertilizer, use it on ornamentals.
Edit; where do you come from?
seamless transition into the ad yet again. great work !!
I don't even drink coffee and I thought it was good
When a disaster happens in the Caribbean
Everyone: Oh no Florida 😢
Cuba, Bahamas, Jamaica, Haiti, PR, DR etc: 😐
Why is this facts though
murica moment
Honestly, during every hurricane it’s like they don’t exist to these guys
I feel worse for you guys then Florida. Florida is shitty by most metrics.
Don't forget us here in the lesser Antilles. On the initial map where you see the majority of the sargassum coming on the south side of the Caribbean, that's where we are. 24 different nations
So,...sargassum is the oceanic equivalent of tumbleweeds. A collaboration with CGP Grey might be in order.😁
I remember working on a island for 5 days around Sargassum, that stuff is brutal when you wake up. The sand flees love it.
I just came back from Mexico and noticed how bad the situation has gotten. The same beach 10 years ago was crystal clear. Now it’s brow and filled with stinking sargassum
Thanks for the awesome content and great videos!!!
comment bot
Florida man has been training for this his whole life
I'm glad that you mentioned how people get rid of this around 4:30, because it's literally just _seaweed_ just in massive quantities. It _could_ be turned into biodiesel via esterization, but I'm guessing that there's no company here that wants to take in 100+ tons of seaweed from a beach using combines that don't physically exist yet (AFAIK) just to make a relatively small batch of biodiesel. The fertilizer point is great though, but the arsenic concerns are insanely blown out of proportion, this is like Consumer Reports complaining about arsenic levels in rice once every 2 years or so when their readership dips. Hydrogen sulfide is also a fuel source, but again, nobody AFAIK has a generator that can just burn this 100T of this stuff within a two week timespan, meets emissions standards, is profitable, etc.
No matter how ya cook it, it *still* tastes like hot sargassum.
Since it sucks up a lot of CO2, I wonder if another possible cause it's growing is just because of the increasing CO2 in the air? Since the ocean takes so much of it in? I'm just a newbie in the aquarium hobby, but people who are really (rich) into it will inject CO2 into their aquariums to make the plants grow like crazy.
Probably so. Hopefully a lot of that carbon can stay sequestered somehow instead of being re-released, possibly in even worse forms than CO2.
@@Giantcrabz Bricks and fertilizer will do that.
So is there a chance we can get an episode on Sargassum bricks or is that just a pipe dream?
i didn’t expect one direction to be mentioned at all, but as an old fan, i’m glad to know sargassum are also veteran fans
I just got back from a Caribbean cruise. I saw this all over in the ocean and was wondering what it was, your timing is unreal.
thanks for the advice, you really inspired me to go and get that questionably sourced, questionably aged bag of coffee beans 10/10 would recommend.
Very optimistic to say that Florida isn't ruined already.
Looks like alaskan cruises are gonna be a hit this year
Its true. I was in Cancun, Tulum and Playa Del Carmen recently and there was so much of this stuff that I eventually avoided going to the beach as it was impossible to go for a swim.
Damn it, I could of sworn it was made out of leather.
Nope, turns out they sold you a belt made of seaweed
Can't wait to hear the news story 'Florida Man Encounters Colossal Algae Blob.'
I remember growing up and seeing this in the ocean streatching for miles. Was really fun to net in clumps and see what animals were living in it. Never knew the name of it til now.
dude i was speaking about this with my dad for so long it all started in 2013 or so, so happy u did a vid about it I remember a few weeks ago watching a report of how this will be by far the largest seaweed summer and last year's was massive
Interesting. My family went to the Texas Gulf Coast in the summer of 2012 and the beaches were completely covered in the stuff. I grew up near the Gulf Coast and spent summers going to the beach all the time, but I never saw anything like that before that trip in 2012. We had to make paths through it to get from the clean sand down to the water. It was more than a foot deep in most places and it really smelled awful. I didn’t know what it was or why it was so bad, but now I know all about it! Thanks!
Galveston ain’t so pretty, Crystal Beach is the Fjord next to Galveston and it is the opposite of crystal
so what you've only lived an extremely minute of time on this earth, what the hell do you really know - CLUE: N O T H I N G
Let me re-iterate NOTHING!!! GET IT THRU YOUR FRIGGIN STUBBORN HEAD AND WAKE UP
I remember piles higher than my head as a child.
@@g11operatorcrystal beach is not a "fjiord" it's on the Bolliver" Peninsula" bordering east Galveston Bay, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Galveston ship channel connecting the gulf and the Bay
I was having a hard time following along with this video, until the One Direction references. Great storytelling, so much clarity now.
Imagine in 10 years it’s so much sargassum that it completely makes the coastlines inhabitable
Sargassum touching my back in the water is my #2 fear.
hai has definitely upped the graphics recently, they're so good and well made
St.Lucia is finally doing something useful lmao
Thank you sam, for putting sponsorships at the end and not in the middle
Florida had it coming honestly
It'll be pretty funny to wat h Florida try to blame this on the gays. I'm sure they'll say the sargassum is secretly a trans terrorist.
I feel like if I clicked any of these links my bank account will be emptied
@@mnm5165 take one for the team and find out
Exactly
@@mnm5165 jokes on them, my bank account is already empty
I live in the Riviera Maya and it’s fun when you see the tourist complain about a plant while I get paid to get rid of it.
What do you do with it?
Sargassum is edible, it's harvested to feed livestock too, and you can fry, boil, steam or dry it. It's played a part in Chinese medicine as far back as the 8th century, treating goiters (high iodine content) - and made into tea to control phlegm.
It should only be consumed in small qtys because of the arsenic and - worse but not mentioned - cadmium.
Trust chinese to eat toxic or poisonous things and call it a medicine. Every day I am ashamed to be related to chinese people who carry this shoddy substandard history and civilisation with them.
that one direction reference really helped thank you!
There should be an X prize for finding economic, environmentally friendly means of removing arsenic and cadmium from sargassum. If found, it should be economically viable to harvest it offshore and compost it into an excellent soil amendment/conditioner.
I live right next to the beach in Miami and these are EVERYWHERE. I used to think that this is how seaweed usually is because it’s all I would ever see
This may prove beneficial to Florida in the long term. Beaches upholstered in decaying sargassum may discourage more people from coming here, and perhaps motivate some who have arrived in recent decades to go elsewhere.
I was on the beach on the east coast of Puerto Rico a few years ago and there was a bunch of this stuff.
We're in Belize for a few weeks, and it's all over the place here...
It's weird to focus the potential harm on the tourists on vacation instead of on the people who live there.
In Cancún no one gives a fuck about the people living there, but American tourists are like gods.
American is just a giant place for business; people's wellbeing is largely irrelevant and always have been. American education and media prepare everyone to see things solely through the lense of a market fundamentalist, solidarity be damned.
I mean think of how much shareholder VALUE is being generated, without worrying about the..."externality" of pumping millions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere so we can have unnecessary, cheap, plastic disposable shit and constant pointless wars started exclusively by rich people? That's what really matters!
@@Giantcrabz Please don't "All Lives Matter" the harm caused to mostly black and brown people.
Yeah capitalism is shit, we know. Y'all don't do this to white communities. smh
That's Ron DeSantis job. 😂
Hearing "sargassum" unlocked a memory from playing Zoo Tycoon ~15 years ago and the sea turtles were really into that stuff
People often say my sarcasm is akin to rotting fish too, but that's why I carry breath mints.
As a Florida Man I'm not sure why they don't just erect a giant net three feet offshore. If the beaches are closed due to red tide anyways, why not just erect the Fence?
A fence 3 feet off the shore would just have tons of it rotting 3 feet from shore.
That's NOT going to help the tourists who want to be in the beach.
The problem isn't that sargassum builds up on the beaches.
The problem is that humans want to ALSO use those beaches...... And at the same time the sargassum shows up.
No one cleans it up from areas humans don't want to use.
Finally an opponent that can challenge Florida
Around 2014-2015 I experienced mountains of sargassum on the gulf coast. It was putrid. You could smell it miles away. IIRC a later analysis determined the blob that year was mostly caused by unrestricted use of fertilizer and dumping of raw sewage (also acting as fertilizer 🤷♂️) into the ocean, mostly by Brazil.
Thanks TH-cam, I literally just heard this on radio a few days ago and now this gets recommended to me.
I live in Grenada and Sargasso weed has been causing more and more problems of the years
I have a few questions, is the plant named after the sea or is the sea named after the plant? Either way, sargassum grass is not new to the Sargasso Sea there are many accounts of what happened to sailors when they were at the wrong place at the wrong time and got tangled up in it, No es bueno. Bueno un poco no!
If this is setting up to be a record year for sargassum, how long have accurate records of the quantity, location etc of sargassum been recorded? Is anyone really qualified to proclaim what a "normal" amount of sargassum is? How much oil can be squeezed out of a ton of sargassum? What ruminant likes the defatted remains of sargassum as a salt supplement to their diet?
And, probably the most important question to ask is, what role does intermittent sargassum accumulation on beaches have on the ecosystem of the region long term? It has been happening to one extent or another since long before there was anyone there to exclaim No es bueno!
Omg, I'm really excited about this!
Good green material to add to composts.
Florida beach vacation.. there's so many other reasons to not go to Florida, that seaweed doesn't make the list..
Good. Stay away, please.
@@UpYourArsenal Oh, don't worry I will. And when the blob comes, so will everyone else.
Settling on a Florida vacation is like going to Applebee's for dinner. Sure, it can be OK, but there are so many better options.
But, welcome to America. Our media ingrains in us that it is the be-all and end-all of vacation destinations, therefore it is. And woe unto those who try and think outside the norm.
@@einienj3281 I bet you wish that was true - you don't even know what this 'blob' actually is, because they aren't bothering to tell you the whole story. But enjoy not being here, it's a better place without you.
@@UpYourArsenal "Bothering to tell the whole story".. 😂😂😂
"How the sargassum belt will ruin Florida"
And here I was thinking that the lack of culture and sophistication there would do it.
The lack of culture and sophistication you speak of is clearly where you are, not in FL.
Not to mention overt car dependency, chain restaurants and just being an overall brackish s---hole.
@@sabretooth1997 Believe it or not, most of the world enjoys not living in large cities, and as a result we don't have access to public transportation. This isn't a bad thing for most of the world, but you apparently hate it. Just stay out of FL, we're ok with not having you here - too many other people are *moving* here to be a part of it.
Awesome! I was just getting used to train derailment season
The effort made to get that Chanel bottle sticker right is down right laudable.
I'm in favor of anything that's going to ruin florida
This seems like a perfectly salable form of compostable matter, if people with the equipment to collect it could mobilize to pick it up. Oxygen bulbs, lots of ocean minerals, it's a gold mine. Edit: Excellent, people have had the same idea.
Except the arsenic content might be an issue.
And no matter how you cook it, it still tastes like Sargassum -- pirate ghost, the Venture Brothers
We get Sargassum in Florida almost every year but maybe not this much. Yes they use machines to clean it up. I think they haul it away and burn it somewhere. It does bother sinus and eyes. Keeps people off the beaches. I live in central Florida and it is supposed to go south of us but I bet we get some. The gulf stream flows north.
Today's Fact: The world's largest spider is the Goliath birdeater, which can grow up to 12 inches in leg span.
Cute!
12 inches is soooo big 😩🤤
@@nealrigga6969 bruh what
@@nealrigga6969 yeah that’s enough TH-cam for you today log off bro
Get big old tankers retrofitted to haul seaweed upon the decks, chop chop and pack the holds then offload in ports as cheap garden and landscaping mulch, somewhere someone can patch holes in a dirt road with the stuff
I went to an uninhabited island in the Keys last summer for scouts and the stuff was everywhere. Sorta learned to get used to the smell after a few hours
meanwhile on the central florida coast, we just leave it there and say “it fights beach erosion”
Gather it up. Mix it with biochar. Spread a 2 inch thick layer of wood chips on a 2 acre severally GMO latent field/desert/etc. Inoculate chips with mushroom ( Armillaria - honey mushrooms) spores, lay seaweed-biochar mixture on top, then bury that with vermicompost, cardboard, woodchips etc. 2 year land sabbath. Track progress. Do this to all farms in Florida. Start this state over & produce all organic foods.
Gotta love this Chanel #2 translation! AKA Paris sewer, coming next summer!
The one direction references give me life
Hydrogen Sulfide is a smell most people are familiar with. It's often called "farts". Lots of people think farts are methane, but it is rare for any animal, humans included, to release methane.
That was a smooth sponsor transition
And a whole new genre of ‘yo mama’ jokes was born.
I swear when I submitted bricks as an idea for a video, I just thought it would be interesting, I never realised it was meme-level
If it has arsenic in it, won’t that make it a bad fertilizer?