Adelaide's Algal Bloom

 

I have lived in Adelaide most of my life. Adelaide, like all Australian cities is on the coast - the sea is never far away. My first memory of the sea was travelling down Anzac Hwy as a kid in the family car. We used to have a competition to see who could see the sea first. ‘I can see the sea’.  ‘I can see the sea’ chants rang out from the back seat as the sea appeared as a thin sliver on the horizon.

 

The sea has always been synonymous with joy in my life: a place that meant fun, a celebration, coolness after a swim. My Adelaide beach has featured at every stage of my life: a place to make out with your teenage girlfriend,  to work on that suntan, do some exercise, lie in the shallows, collect sea creatures, watch the sunset, enjoy a leisurely stroll, and in later life simply a place to enjoy the natural beauty and a sense of peace.

 

Apart from early evenings on hot summer days Adelaide beaches are rarely crowded. They stretch from Port Noarlunga in the South to North Haven - some 30 to 40 kilometres. Fine, silky sand as good as you'll find anywhere in the world. Above all a place of respite and regeneration. You notice that people are rarely badly behaved at the beach. The sense of space and wind and the nature of the salt air seems to bring out the best in people. 

In January this year 2025 there were reports of people feeling sick after swimming in the waters of the southern Fleurieu. It was attributed to something called an algal bloom. This bloom slowly worked its way around to St Vincent's Gulf and by June had breached the entire Adelaide coastline. Dead marine life started appearing on our beaches: stingrays, sharks, seahorses, crabs, puffer fish... . the number of carcasses multiplied. Our beloved beaches had become places of death. Like an underwater bushfire the algal bloom wiped out most of the gulf's marine life. A place I had turned to all my life for peace and quiet became a constant horror show.

 

I can no longer walk along my beaches. I can walk near the sea as long as I can't see the dead creatures washed up on the sand. To walk along the sand now breaks my heart. Adelaide, the city between the hills and the sea, is now the city between the hills and a marine graveyard. People no longer go fishing or crabbing. My son can no longer go for his daily ‘sanity swim’. Thousands of Adelaideans now have to look elsewhere for that respite and regeneration.

 

Climate change has come home to roost on our doorstep with a vengeance. The warnings of environmental disaster have been clear and persistent for 50 years and we have done little to address the crisis.

 

For decades fruit growers and agriculturists have been using various chemicals and fertilisers to boost production in the fields and orchards alongside the Murray River.  In 2023 record floods along the Murray washed thousands of megalitres of river water into the sea at the Murray mouth. Occasionally in recent years our gulf waters have heated up sufficiently to prompt the onset of small algal blooms. A particularly long dry winter in 2024 didn't allow the gulf waters to cool and when that warmer water mixed with the tainted river water from the Murray the perfect conditions for the creation and spread of the algal bloom were present. So we now have this environmental disaster on our doorstep. The sea still sometimes looks gorgeous and blue and inviting from a distance but it is devoid of marine life. We have killed all our fish.