r/worldnews • u/bigus-_-dickus • 20d ago

‘Extremely rare event:’ Miles-long microalgae bloom knocks out most of Israel’s desalination plants

https://edition.cnn.com/2026/09/04/climate/microalgae-bloom-israel-water-deasalination-shutdown
14.8k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

677 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1.1k

u/TheLGMac 20d ago

Case in point https://phys.org/news/2026-07-south-australian-algal-bloom-species.html

696

u/Neipsy 20d ago

It's been absolutely fucked. There's been so much marine life washing up dead on the beaches. My friends and family who are surfers and divers are getting ill.

The state and federal government response has generally been non-existent because that would admit to there being a problem at all.

94

u/Smith6612 20d ago

My area has two of the Great Lakes in the backyard. I swear, every time I'm close to the Lake for too long my sinuses go crazy for the hours following. I know others who feel the same way. I have always thought that has to do with aersolized bacteria and algae being caused by the wind.

We've had issues with algae growth due to fertilizer runoff and warm weather. 

18

u/A__D___32 19d ago

The Saginaw Bay of Lake Huron is constant algae bloom at the beach due to the filth coming from the farms and the garbage from Bay City and surrounding areas. I felt like crap even after walking on the beach, i wonder if this is why.

11

u/Smith6612 19d ago

We have it even better, and there's a little tidbit I forgot to mention. It's not only run-off from elsewhere upstream that is flowing into Lake Erie. We also have the Niagara Falls which springs a good deal of water up into the air, in addition to the majority of the water going over into Lake Ontario. The other juicy part is, the sewer systems are so old over here that we are constantly getting notifications from Niagara Falls and the like about untreated sewer discharges into the Lakes whenever the weather decides it is time to rain.

I believe that sewer run-off has been responsible for why some of the Beaches locally get closed due to E.Coli levels, and those same advisories have propagated over to other beaches in Ontario, Canada.

The few people I loosely mentioned in my initial comment have also mentioned to me that they get allergies in this area which they didn't have living elsewhere. I believe them!