This intense warming, along with decades of abuse from pollution and overfishing, sent the Marmara into a state of maritime shock. At the end of 2020, increased concentrations of phosphorus and nitrogen led to a boom in phytoplankton, single-celled organisms whose name means “plant drifter” in Greek. The Marmara’s warming surface temperature also caused its waters to stratify, slowing the currents that would normally help disrupt algae growth.
Eventually, the phytoplankton began to run out of nutrients, causing the cells of some species to exude a sticky substance. As these cells died, they collided and stuck together, aggregating into globs that hovered in the warmest layer of the stratified water. With time and exposure, the globs turned into a submerged mat of mucus that trapped nearly everything around it—bacteria, fish larvae, dead cells, debris. Bacteria thrived on the dead phytoplankton, adding to the mat’s mass. “At that point, it takes on a life of its own,” Mustafa Yucel, a marine-science professor at Middle East Technical University’s Institute of Marine Science, told me. With increasing water temperatures, he said, we should prepare to see more extreme reactions in our seas—including invasive-species outbreaks and massive algal and seaweed blooms.
According to Ayşen Erdinçler, an environmental-science professor at Boğaziçi University and the head of Istanbul’s Department of Environmental Protection and Development, the risk of contracting a bacteria-borne illness from swimming increases 12 to 18 times when concentrated mucilage is present.
The most disgusting thing about climate change is that it’s happening at all.
The most disgusting symptom of climate change so far
The sargassum blooms in the Caribbean are in a similar vein, agricultural runoff from Brazil combined with warmer ocean temps has led to these explosions of seaweed that now just washes ashore all these formerly pristine beaches in the Caribbean. They try to remove it but it just washes in too fast, piles up on the beaches, and decomposes. The smell is rank. They try to spin it as “a natural phenomenon” and “good habitat for sea creatures” but it’s just cope
The tourism industry in the summer is slowly getting destroyed, it’s really quite something. It’s my understanding too that it affects everywhere except Bermuda which is too far north
That’s a shame. I spent some time on the Caribbean coast of Panama and it was such a beautiful ecosystem. Mangrove forests, dolphin bays, quality beaches.
