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Sargassum can wind up on beaches in enormous heaps, and in 2026, those heaps are predicted to be even bigger. Photo: Wikimedia Commons<\/p>\n
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For Florida residents and visitors alike, sargassum season can be a stinking mess. This year, it\u2019s likely to be even messier and stinkier than ever before. According to reports<\/a>, it\u2019s estimated that the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt will produce more than 37.5 million tons of the stuff in 2026.<\/p>\n Sargassum is a kind of seaweed. It\u2019s a brown-ish algae that forms enormous mats on the open ocean, and when the wind and currents decide to, they can deposit those mats on coastlines. Sargassum is interesting stuff. Unlike regular seaweeds, it isn\u2019t attached to the seabed. It floats around getting everything it needs without roots, but in the last few decades a few things have turned those floating, slimy mats into a beast. Nutrient rich runoff, warming oceans, and shifting currents are all helping it along, and that\u2019s not a great thing.<\/p>\n In the North Atlantic, there\u2019s an area known as the Sargassum Sea. It\u2019s about two-million square miles, and, as the name implies, it\u2019s home to a vast amount of the stuff. But oddly strong winds and weird weather are making it likely, according to the University of South Florida, that there will be \u201crecord-high Sargassum amount in most regions<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n The last few years have consistently been record breakers in the sargassum world. \u201cTwenty-eighteen was our big, eye-opening growth moment,\u201d oceanographer and sargassum expert Dr. Tracy Fanara told Weather.com<\/a>. \u201cI think we got up to 20 million tons. And then last year, it broke records again at 38 million tons, if I recall correctly. And this year we\u2019re on track at this rate to beat that.\u201d<\/p>\n While sargassum isn\u2019t necessarily bad, too much of anything can be a real pain in the butt, especially for a place that\u2019s reliant on tourism, like Florida. Huge piles of sargassum on beaches not only stinks to high heaven, but it attracts sea lice, accumulates toxins, and can even contain flesh-eating bacteria<\/a>.<\/p>\n