Strange Goo spotted near Alaska

[60'schild]

OK, now this definitely sounds like Science Fiction, but it isn't...

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/260/story...k=omni_popular

Something big and strange is floating through the Chukchi Sea between Wainwright and Barrow.

Hunters from Wainwright first started noticing the stuff sometime probably 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.

Brower and other borough officials, joined by the U.S. Coast Guard, flew out to Wainwright to investigate. The agencies found "globs" of the stuff floating miles offshore Friday and collected samples for testing.

Later, Brower said, the North Slope team in a borough helicopter spotted a long strand of the stuff and followed it for about 15 miles, shooting video from the air.

The next day the floating substance arrived offshore from Barrow, about 90 miles east of Wainwright, and borough officials went out in boats, collected more samples and sent them off for testing too.

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.

[MIB41]

When you got to go, you got to go!

[60'schild]

Hmm ... anybody remember the Movie ... the Thing (original James Arness version or Kurt Russell remake)??

Wasn't that in the Arctic??

It's aliens!!

Maybe THAT was the real reason the Governor of Alaska resigned??

You betcha!

[jasonmego1277]

Ummm...............is Agent Mulder and Agent Scully busy these days ? Could this be the goo that does in the human race ? Could it be a mutagen that turns us into zombies, vampires.........Hell sleestacks ???? I think your right, Palin saw this coming , and said I gotta get the outta here.

[60'schild]

When you got to go, you got to go!

That's Goo, not Poo...

(now try reading it WITH your glasses on!!! )

[Evel KMego]

I swear I haven't been to Alaska lately

[thunderbolt]

So, when's Palin going to shoot it from a helicopter?

[60'schild]

Well, they say it's been identified:

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/251/story/72008.html

Then again, they identified UFO's as Swamp gas .... YOU decide:

A sample of the giant black mystery blob that Wainwright hunters discovered this month floating in the Chukchi Sea has been identified.

Not bunker oil seeping from an aging, sunken ship. Not a sea monster.

It looks to be a stringy batch of algae.

"We got the results back from the lab today," said Ed Meggert, of the Department of Environmental Conservation in Fairbanks. "It was marine algae."

Miles of the thick, dark gunk had been spotted floating between Barrow and Wainwright, prompting North Slope Borough officials and the Coast Guard to investigate last week. A sample was sent to a DEC lab in Palmer, where workers looked at it under a microscope and declared it some kind of simple plant — an algae, Meggert said.

The goo fast became an Alaska mystery. And the new findings still leave questions unanswered: Why is there so much of it in a region where people say they've never seen anything quite like it?

Local hunters and whalers didn't know what to make of it. The Coast Guard labeled the substance biological, but knew little else. The stuff had hairy strands in it and was tangled with jellyfish, said a borough official.

Terry Whitledge is director of the Institute of Marine Science at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He hasn't had a chance to look at the DEC's sample yet, but a friend with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration e-mailed him a picture of the gunk.

"Filamentous algae," he concluded.

Filamentous?

"It means it's just stringy."