‘A new normal’: Miami faces worsening seaweed problem as piles of algae wash up on beaches
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- Miami-Dade County removed 9,000 tons of sargassum from its beaches in July alone — the most ever cleared in a single month — as part of a $3 million annual cleanup funded by tourist development taxes
- The Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt has doubled in size every five years since forming in 2011, with satellite imagery this summer showing 33.5 million tons, second-highest on record behind 38 million tons in 2025
- Brian LaPointe, a Florida Atlantic University researcher who has studied sargassum since 1982, links the proliferation to climate change — ocean warming boosting evaporation, extreme rain events, and nutrient runoff from the Amazon, Congo, and Mississippi rivers
- Mexico's President Claudia Sheinbaum announced a $115 million national plan to combat sargassum using ships that scoop seaweed from open water, an approach US agencies currently prohibit over marine life concerns
- Excessive sargassum washing ashore is creating dead zones, damaging coral reefs and seagrass beds, and producing hydrogen sulfide odors that pose human health risks, per LaPointe's research
- About 700 sea turtles have built nests on Miami-Dade beaches this season; cleanup crews must halt heavy equipment use from 30 minutes before sunset until sunrise to protect them, and county commissioners voted in July to petition the state for more raking flexibility
Why it matters: Miami-Dade alone spends $3 million yearly on sargassum cleanup, and the underlying cause — nutrient runoff from the Amazon, Congo, and Mississippi rivers amplified by climate-driven extreme rainfall — is regional in scope, meaning local raking budgets and tourist-funded taxes cannot stop blooms that double every five years.
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