Bizarre Blob of Arctic Goo: 12 Miles Long – Visits Alaska
Something big and strange is floating through the Chukchi Sea between Wainwright and Barrow.
No one in the area can recall seeing anything like it before.
This huge thing is not oil. One coast guard official said the following:
“It kind of has an odor; I can’t describe it.”
Nobody knows for sure what the gunk is, but Petty Officer 1st Class Terry Hasenauer says the Coast Guard is sure what it is not.
“It’s certainly biological,” Hasenauer said. “It’s definitely not an oil product of any kind. It has no characteristics of an oil, or a hazardous substance, for that matter.
“It’s definitely, by the smell and the makeup of it, it’s some sort of naturally occurring organic or otherwise marine organism.”
Local hunters and whale captains first started noticing the stuff sometime early last week. It’s thick and dark and “gooey” and is drifting for miles in the cold Arctic waters, according to Gordon Brower with the North Slope Borough’s Planning and Community Services Department.
The U.S. Coast Guard has now accompanied local officials who have flown out to investigate. The agencies found “globs” of the stuff floating miles offshore Friday and collected samples for testing.
A local helicopter has shot video of it from the air, following one strand for 15 miles. The next day the floating substance arrived offshore near Wainwright and local officials collected more samples for testing.
Something else: No one in Barrow or Wainwright can remember seeing anything like this before.
Image and news via Shifting Baselines
via Anchorage Daily News
Thanks for this intriguing post…it certainly titillates the eco-imagination. It may indeed turn out to be some sort of human industrial waste (or a microbial “bloom”/colony fed by such waste)…the “gooey” description prompts one to think of some “oily” (hydrocarbon) substance. But Nature often surprises science….I hope you report on the follow up for this!
The Earth took a dump.
It looks almost exactly like the algae that grows in my pond. The gooeyness could just be contaminents in the water which have clung to the algae. Currents in the ocean often cause debris and other floaty stuff to clump together.
It’s algae.
http://www.adn.com/news/alaska/story/867160.html
I guess it could be like some kind of prehistoric frozen decomposed corpses floating since the ice of the poles is melting…
Come on do a little research! It’s algae like Tim said.
http://www.hotboxsports.com/local_news.php
cook it and eat it.
http://chinesefood.about.com/b/2006/12/10/fun-food-trivia-guess-the-mystery-food-8.htm
I can’t believe no one has made a reference to the Blob, the X-Files, or Spider-Man yet….
If you read Stephen King’s “The Raft” 9or saw the TV adaptation in Creepshow 2 (1987), then you already know what this is. DON’T let it grab you…you’ll be sorry!
In fact, that guy’s finger is just too close…
Has anyone else seen the old “Creepshow” Movies? Just wondering, cause there was a part in there with something like this floating in a lake…