Satellite Images Show the Movement of Floating Sargassum in the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The question of the origin, distribution and fate of the floating seaweed Sargassum has fascinated sailors and scientists from the time of Columbus. Observations from ships are hampered by the large and variable area over which Sargassum is dispersed. Here we use satellite imagery to present the first mapping of the full distribution and movement of the population of Sargassum in the Gulf of Mexico and western Atlantic in the years 2002 to 2008. For the first time, we show a seasonal pattern in which Sargassum originates in the northwest Gulf of Mexico in spring of each year, is advected into the Atlantic in about July, appearing east of Cape Hatteras as a "Sargassum jet", and ending northeast of the Bahamas in February of the following year. This pattern appears consistent with historical surveys. Future satellite observations will show whether this pattern repeats in all or most years.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".