This seaweed is really thick and dense, look at it on the beach, I could see where there would be concern with it jamming in boat motors.
https://www.amusingplanet.com/2019/12/sargasso-sea-and-sargassum.html
The Sargasso Sea in the North Atlantic Ocean, near the Caribbean, is unlike any other sea in this planet. The boundaries of the sea are defined not by landmasses, but by four currents that swirl clockwise around the Bermuda forming a vast whirlpool called the North Atlantic gyre. The Sargasso Sea is part of this gyre. These ocean currents bring marine plants and debris from far away and deposit them into the gyre, yet the ocean water in the Sargasso Sea has a deep blue color and exceptional clarity. But the most defining characteristic of the Sargasso Sea is the presence of a seaweed called sargassum, that exist in large floating mats hundreds, and sometimes thousands of kilometers long. The Sargasso Sea got its name from this weed.
Early explorers regarded the Sargasso Sea with fear because they thought their ships would get stuck in the weed. When Christopher Columbus’s Santa María sailed to the Canary Island through the Sargasso Sea, he noted in the ship’s log that the weed was “so thick that it actually held back the ships.” Areas of the sea also overlaps the mythic Bermuda Triangle, and there have been stories of ships getting stuck in the sea for years. But its not the weed that causes ships to suddenly stop moving in the Sargasso Sea. It’s the wind, or the lack of it.
In the past decade, the sargassum in the Sargasso Sea has been prolificating rapidly. Large mats of the seaweed now stretches across the North Atlantic, some eight thousand kilometers long. Scientist call it “The Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt”. Sargassum now regularly wash ashore on beaches of the tropical Atlantic, the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico in vast quantities, where they rot and emit foul smell. Experts say that increasing levels of nutrients that are being flushed into ocean via the Amazon in the spring and summer each year, as a result of human activities including deforestation and fertilizer use, have resulted in the growth.
https://www.amusingplanet.com/2019/12/sargasso-sea-and-sargassum.html
