Secrets of the Sargasso Monster

Living with the Strange Creatures of Climate Change and Ecosystem Destruction, Building Caribbean Futures in a Time of Seaweed

[Book in progress]

What happens when an unprecedented weather event drives a spectacularly diverse floating seaweed ecosystem—“The Golden Rainforest of the Sea”—onto Caribbean shores in 2011? And then this freak occurrence becomes a self-sustaining pattern, returning almost every year after that in increasingly large, increasingly destructive inundation events that smother sea life, snarl fishing, disrupt tourism, crash electrical grids and desalinization plants, deepen inequalities, and billow toxic gas, causing health problems for tens of thousands of the Caribbean’s most vulnerable residents? What happens when this life-giving and death-dealing creature begins to circulate in a route that precisely mirrors the Atlantic’s most haunted seaway, the Middle Passage?

This uncanny phenomenon has collapsed boundaries between environmental threat and ecological wonder that govern most disaster management and conservation work. And it has left many Caribbeans asking: Are yearly seaweed inundations yet another crisis making life in the region increasingly unlivable, or are they a gift—a gateway to a new future?

Secrets of the Sargasso Monster explores the strange and contradictory world of Sargassum natans and Sargassum fluitans, the only two seaweed species on the planet that live a completely free-floating nomadic life. “Sargasso” (shorthand for combinations of the two species) is the main constituent of what oceanographers, in 2018, dubbed “the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt” (GASB)—at its last peak in 2022, an 8,800-kilometer-long serpentine band of vibrant life weighing as much as 200,000 adult blue whales on an annual collision course with West African Brazilian, and Caribbean shores.