加勒比海藻潮：从度假天堂到生态困局
Each summer, the postcard beaches of the Caribbean undergo a transformation that no tourism board would celebrate. From Quintana Roo to Trinidad, shorelines once lauded for their bone-white sand are smothered under a pungent, ankle-deep mat of decomposing sargassum. Over the past decade, a floating rainforest of this golden-brown seaweed has erupted annually in the tropical Atlantic, a phenomenon so vast that satellites track its thousand-kilometre tendrils. The influx, arriving in unprecedented volumes, releases hydrogen sulfide as it rots — a gas that tarnishes silver, blackens paint, and drives away visitors as effectively as any hurricane. What was initially dismissed as a passing anomaly has settled into a grim seasonal ritual, threatening the economic lifeblood of an entire region.
The ecological engine behind this bloom remains a subject of urgent scientific inquiry, though a consensus is crystallising around a complex interplay of factors. Sargassum has always drifted in the Northern Atlantic, its eponymous Sargasso Sea serving as a calm nursery for marine life. Yet since 2011, satellite imagery has revealed the emergence of a separate ‘Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt’, stretching from West Africa to the Gulf of Mexico. Researchers point to a confluence of warming ocean temperatures — which accelerate algal metabolism — and a surfeit of nutrients washed seaward from the Amazon and Congo river basins, their waters laden with agricultural runoff and sewage. Shifting wind patterns and altered upwelling regimes may also be seeding the belt with iron-rich Saharan dust. The precise trigger, however, defies a simple explanation; rather, it appears to be a perfect storm of anthropogenic forcing and natural variability, a signature of an over-fertilised sea.
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