Why don t the Florida Keys have waves?

The island chain has the unique geographic good fortune of having the only living coral reef in the continental U.S. running parallel along its length. The reef acts as a barrier to the waves coming in from the Atlantic Ocean, preventing waves from pounding against shoreline rocks, thereby inhibiting sand build-up.



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Key West , like the rest of the Florida Keys is not known as a 'beach destination' There is a good reason for this: America's only living coral reef (and the world's third longest barrier reef). The barrier reef does it's job of protecting the Florida Keys from large ocean waves.

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The Keys has the longest living coral reef in America, running 221 miles from Key Largo FL and continuing southwest to the Dry Tortugas National Park. The coral reefs protection keeps the waves from crashing ashore, which causes erosion. This also means the water inshore of the coral reefs is shallower, and calmer.

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There may be barrier islands, artificial breakwaters, or large reefs that break large waves before they reach the beach, so only small waves make it to the beach. You may have visited on a particularly calm day.

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You can also swim and enjoy other water sports like windsurfing and snorkeling as well as kayaking and paddleboarding in the clear, clean water inhabited by tropical fish.

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As sargassum washes ashore every year in Key West, locals and visitors alike are primarily annoyed by the smell of the sargassum quantity on the beach. This giant blob of seaweed breaks up along the shore to create a mess on public beaches in Monroe County, but there's not too much danger involved.

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This mass bleaching event has made an already bad situation worse. Well before summer, the area of healthy reefs in the Florida Keys had already declined by 90 percent, due to past heat waves, diseases, ocean acidification, and other threats. The majority of Florida's reefs that remain, meanwhile, are eroding.

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The Weddell Sea has been claimed by scientists to have the clearest waters of any ocean in the world. Described by a historian as “the most wretched and dismal region on earth”, due to the flash freezes that caught Shackleton's ship, its clarity is only belied by the sheer depth of the ocean below.

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Florida Keys Could Be Underwater by 2025.

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