Y’know until now I always assumed all the seaweed on the beach was common all around the world and not just the Caribbean. Weirdly enough sargassum is nostalgic for me since I spent a lot of time at the beach as a kid

The middle of the Atlantic ocean used to be called the Sargasso Sea. Spiralling currents kept massive blobs of the stuff pretty densely packed a given area. They were thick enough that sailing ships would slowed or stranded in the mess.

I actually live in Jamaica, and yeah, the seaweed has been choking up all the beaches. People here try to deal with it by collecting it and selling it to be used as fertilizer.

Sam is keeping the entire stock footage industry in business

Sam just clowning on random fish always makes my day.

Sargassum has been horrible in Puerto Aventura, MX for the last 10 years. It smells so bad. It's feet deep all along the coast. It's so hard to keep up with . We actually have a Sargassum Report that goes out to the are daily. Sargassum has always been around, but it usually didn't appear until May through June. Now it starts in February.

I'm so glad Sam made a joke about bricks again. I was afraid something was wrong.

I have spent the past 3-4 months working on a research paper about another species of algae that fucks with Florida routinely, just recently finished my rough draft, and the moment I saw this I had a Vietnam-style flashback to it

Seaweed blob can only be stopped by one person... florida man needs to finally rise to glory.

It wasn't sargassum, but a similar seaplant blob on a French beach killed a horse with hydrogen sulfide poisoning, so the bad egg smell is the least of your worries. Another fun fact: at high levels of hydrogen sulfide, the smell goes away, so when the smell stops, the problem either got better.... or worse. Happy beach holidays!

I appreciate the amount of sargastic humour in this video.

My home town is notorious for having a large amount of algae wash up on the the beaches every summer and rot, leaving a distinct and awful smell all along the waterfront all summer. The algae is so voluminous they've used the city's bay to test algae harvesters. Strangely, in later years when I return to visit home, it becomes a nostalgic smell. It's a lot like Ankh-Morpork.

Florida had it coming honestly

Fun fact: the game Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri has a feature known as New Sargasso, referencing the Sargasso Sea, which is a region of the Atlantic Ocean which has a large amount of Sargassum in it due to a massive circular current that tends to keep it there. In the game, it's a gigantic blob of sea fungus with 4 Unity Pods in the middle, which is almost guaranteed to have one of those pods plant a bunch of Kelp in the middle of it that will slowly destroy the blob.

Thank god someone’s trying to put an end to Florida

"you guys are gonna love this, bricks!" and guess what sam I did actually love that

It's about time this channel got back on track. Lot of non brick facts to fast forward thru tho.

Now he single-handedly destroyed the 2023 beach tourism in the Caribbean😂

I thought sargasm was the uncontrolable outburst of laughter after breaking character from a sarcastic joke.

This area used to be called The Sargasso Sea. The beach I surf in SoCal is often buried in sea kelp that has detached from the sea bed, and a few years ago it was stacked up about 4 feet high on the beach.

Sargassum moment

The worst part of sargassum is probably the smell, it's absolutely revolting.

I was on a cruise. And the sheer amount of the stuff that was there… it’s crazy

Thoughts and prayers to the blob, may it emerge victorious inshallah.

Bravo to the animation team, they went hard on this one

Thanks! My wife and I were staring on that from a recent cruise from FL to the Yucatan with bewilderment. Now we know :-D

This video was very informative. I learned so much about One Direction!

I am always impressed by how you can dumb something down just enough to get people to NOT realize that they had just been taught something. "Heh heh...that was funny.....Hey...wait....why do I know what sargassum is ?....Heh heh...sargassum....Algae farts...heh heh...."

With something THAT wide and big, Id imagine it to be atleast a mountain's weight

The mix of animation and stock image looks great!

seamless transition into the ad yet again. great work !!

Thanks for the awesome content and great videos!!!

They fertilise the (potato) fields with that thing where I come from! Makes the food taste amazing.

thanks for the advice, you really inspired me to go and get that questionably sourced, questionably aged bag of coffee beans 10/10 would recommend.

So is there a chance we can get an episode on Sargassum bricks or is that just a pipe dream?

I just got back from a Caribbean cruise. I saw this all over in the ocean and was wondering what it was, your timing is unreal.

I just came back from Mexico and noticed how bad the situation has gotten. The same beach 10 years ago was crystal clear. Now it’s brow and filled with stinking sargassum

So,...sargassum is the oceanic equivalent of tumbleweeds. A collaboration with CGP Grey might be in order.😁

Its true. I was in Cancun, Tulum and Playa Del Carmen recently and there was so much of this stuff that I eventually avoided going to the beach as it was impossible to go for a swim.

I remember working on a island for 5 days around Sargassum, that stuff is brutal when you wake up. The sand flees love it.

It’s all fun and games until Ron DeSantis puts all the Sargassum on a plane and ships it off to Martha’s Vineyard!

Since it sucks up a lot of CO2, I wonder if another possible cause it's growing is just because of the increasing CO2 in the air? Since the ocean takes so much of it in? I'm just a newbie in the aquarium hobby, but people who are really (rich) into it will inject CO2 into their aquariums to make the plants grow like crazy.

dude i was speaking about this with my dad for so long it all started in 2013 or so, so happy u did a vid about it I remember a few weeks ago watching a report of how this will be by far the largest seaweed summer and last year's was massive

I remember growing up and seeing this in the ocean streatching for miles. Was really fun to net in clumps and see what animals were living in it. Never knew the name of it til now.

Interesting. My family went to the Texas Gulf Coast in the summer of 2012 and the beaches were completely covered in the stuff. I grew up near the Gulf Coast and spent summers going to the beach all the time, but I never saw anything like that before that trip in 2012. We had to make paths through it to get from the clean sand down to the water. It was more than a foot deep in most places and it really smelled awful. I didn’t know what it was or why it was so bad, but now I know all about it! Thanks!

Florida man has been training for this his whole life

I'm glad that you mentioned how people get rid of this around 4:30, because it's literally just _seaweed_ just in massive quantities. It _could_ be turned into biodiesel via esterization, but I'm guessing that there's no company here that wants to take in 100+ tons of seaweed from a beach using combines that don't physically exist yet (AFAIK) just to make a relatively small batch of biodiesel. The fertilizer point is great though, but the arsenic concerns are insanely blown out of proportion, this is like Consumer Reports complaining about arsenic levels in rice once every 2 years or so when their readership dips. Hydrogen sulfide is also a fuel source, but again, nobody AFAIK has a generator that can just burn this 100T of this stuff within a two week timespan, meets emissions standards, is profitable, etc.

I was on the beach on the east coast of Puerto Rico a few years ago and there was a bunch of this stuff.

I was having a hard time following along with this video, until the One Direction references. Great storytelling, so much clarity now.

Damn it, I could of sworn it was made out of leather.

No matter how ya cook it, it *still* tastes like hot sargassum.

that one direction reference really helped thank you!

St.Lucia is finally doing something useful lmao

I live in the Riviera Maya and it’s fun when you see the tourist complain about a plant while I get paid to get rid of it.

i didn’t expect one direction to be mentioned at all, but as an old fan, i’m glad to know sargassum are also veteran fans

Thank you sam, for putting sponsorships at the end and not in the middle

When a disaster happens in the Caribbean Everyone: Oh no Florida 😢 Cuba, Bahamas, Jamaica, Haiti, PR, DR etc: 😐

Can't wait to hear the news story 'Florida Man Encounters Colossal Algae Blob.'

We get Sargassum in Florida almost every year but maybe not this much. Yes they use machines to clean it up. I think they haul it away and burn it somewhere. It does bother sinus and eyes. Keeps people off the beaches. I live in central Florida and it is supposed to go south of us but I bet we get some. The gulf stream flows north.

Looks like alaskan cruises are gonna be a hit this year

hai has definitely upped the graphics recently, they're so good and well made

Very optimistic to say that Florida isn't ruined already.

There should be an X prize for finding economic, environmentally friendly means of removing arsenic and cadmium from sargassum. If found, it should be economically viable to harvest it offshore and compost it into an excellent soil amendment/conditioner.

Sargassum touching my back in the water is my #2 fear.

This may prove beneficial to Florida in the long term. Beaches upholstered in decaying sargassum may discourage more people from coming here, and perhaps motivate some who have arrived in recent decades to go elsewhere.

As a Florida Man I'm not sure why they don't just erect a giant net three feet offshore. If the beaches are closed due to red tide anyways, why not just erect the Fence?

I went to an uninhabited island in the Keys last summer for scouts and the stuff was everywhere. Sorta learned to get used to the smell after a few hours

I just got back from PR and it was already hitting bad. I really hope it doesn’t get too bad bc I’m going to ST.Thomas and The Florida Keys this summer:(

I live right next to the beach in Miami and these are EVERYWHERE. I used to think that this is how seaweed usually is because it’s all I would ever see

I live in Grenada and Sargasso weed has been causing more and more problems of the years

Around 2014-2015 I experienced mountains of sargassum on the gulf coast. It was putrid. You could smell it miles away. IIRC a later analysis determined the blob that year was mostly caused by unrestricted use of fertilizer and dumping of raw sewage (also acting as fertilizer 🤷‍♂️) into the ocean, mostly by Brazil.

Get big old tankers retrofitted to haul seaweed upon the decks, chop chop and pack the holds then offload in ports as cheap garden and landscaping mulch, somewhere someone can patch holes in a dirt road with the stuff

That's Ron DeSantis job. 😂

It's weird to focus the potential harm on the tourists on vacation instead of on the people who live there.

Awesome! I was just getting used to train derailment season

Imagine in 10 years it’s so much sargassum that it completely makes the coastlines inhabitable

Finally an opponent that can challenge Florida

I have a few questions, is the plant named after the sea or is the sea named after the plant? Either way, sargassum grass is not new to the Sargasso Sea there are many accounts of what happened to sailors when they were at the wrong place at the wrong time and got tangled up in it, No es bueno. Bueno un poco no! If this is setting up to be a record year for sargassum, how long have accurate records of the quantity, location etc of sargassum been recorded? Is anyone really qualified to proclaim what a "normal" amount of sargassum is? How much oil can be squeezed out of a ton of sargassum? What ruminant likes the defatted remains of sargassum as a salt supplement to their diet? And, probably the most important question to ask is, what role does intermittent sargassum accumulation on beaches have on the ecosystem of the region long term? It has been happening to one extent or another since long before there was anyone there to exclaim No es bueno!

Omg, I'm really excited about this!

First time on this channel, you are pretty funny. Thanks for making me laugh, I'll be back.

Florida beach vacation.. there's so many other reasons to not go to Florida, that seaweed doesn't make the list..

"How the sargassum belt will ruin Florida" And here I was thinking that the lack of culture and sophistication there would do it.

Gotta love this Chanel #2 translation! AKA Paris sewer, coming next summer!

Hearing "sargassum" unlocked a memory from playing Zoo Tycoon ~15 years ago and the sea turtles were really into that stuff

I'm in favor of anything that's going to ruin florida

This seems like a perfectly salable form of compostable matter, if people with the equipment to collect it could mobilize to pick it up. Oxygen bulbs, lots of ocean minerals, it's a gold mine. Edit: Excellent, people have had the same idea.

Thanks KZfaq, I literally just heard this on radio a few days ago and now this gets recommended to me.

Good green material to add to composts.

Today's Fact: The world's largest spider is the Goliath birdeater, which can grow up to 12 inches in leg span.

Gather it up. Mix it with biochar. Spread a 2 inch thick layer of wood chips on a 2 acre severally GMO latent field/desert/etc. Inoculate chips with mushroom ( Armillaria - honey mushrooms) spores, lay seaweed-biochar mixture on top, then bury that with vermicompost, cardboard, woodchips etc. 2 year land sabbath. Track progress. Do this to all farms in Florida. Start this state over & produce all organic foods.

Hydrogen Sulfide is a smell most people are familiar with. It's often called "farts". Lots of people think farts are methane, but it is rare for any animal, humans included, to release methane.

The effort made to get that Chanel bottle sticker right is down right laudable.

This video was slightly more than half as interesting. I'm pleasantly surprised!

I'm kind of glad now that we don't have a Caribbean Cruise this year. Also, DrinkTrade is AWESOME!

We're in Belize for a few weeks, and it's all over the place here...

So glad I rented a beach house on lake superior this summer.

And no matter how you cook it, it still tastes like Sargassum -- pirate ghost, the Venture Brothers

People often say my sarcasm is akin to rotting fish too, but that's why I carry breath mints.

I live down the rod from a major beach near Tampa. We already have an influx of the stuff….

Returning from Roatan, Honduras this week.. Maybe 0.05% coverage on the southwest side of the island. N/A FYI