the blob has been found

1
no shit. check out this bizarro story:
io9 wrote:Unidentified Biological "Goo," 15 Miles Long, Creeps Down Alaskan Coast
504x_arcticgoo[1].jpg
A gigantic smear of gooey, black biological material is making its way through the Chukchi Sea between Wainwright and Barrow in Northern Alaska. Eyewitnesses say it's definitely a living entity, though unlike anything they've seen before. Closeup shot below.

The blob was first spotted last week, floating in Arctic waters. Big chunks of it - some as much as "12 miles long," according to the Anchorage Daily News, are drifting through the sea. A helicopter tracked the spread of the goop for 15 miles and saw no end to it. So far, none of unknown substance has touched shore.
504x_arcticgoo2[1].jpg
Coast Guard officer Terry Hasenauer said:
It's certainly biological. 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. in recent history I don't think we've seen anything like this. Maybe inside lakes or in stagnant water or something, but not (in the ocean) that we could recall ... If it was something we'd seen before, we'd be able to say something about it. But we haven't. [The stuff is] gooey [and dark]. It's pitch black when it hits ice and it kind of discolors the ice and hangs off of it. It kind of has an odor; I can't describe it.
Apparently he saw jellyfish tangled in the goo, and somebody else retrieved bones and feathers from a dead goose they found in the goo as well.

Is this the creature described in io9's mad scientist contest from last year? Perhaps a relative of the North Carolina sewer monster? Or is it just a massive algae bloom? The Coast Guard says they're getting it examined and test results will be back in a week.
[video][/video]

anyone else reminded of that segment of 'Creepshow 2'?
[video][/video]
You do not have the required permissions to view the files attached to this post.

Re: the blob has been found

2
Anchorage Daily News wrote:Huge blob of Arctic goo floats past Slope communities
IT'S NOT OIL: No one in the area can recall seeing anything like it before.

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.

"It's definitely, by the smell and the makeup of it, it's some sort of naturally occurring organic or otherwise marine organism."

Something else: No one in Barrow or Wainwright can remember seeing anything like this before, Brower said.

"That's one of the reasons we went out, because in recent history I don't think we've seen anything like this," he said. "Maybe inside lakes or in stagnant water or something, but not (in the ocean) that we could recall ...

"If it was something we'd seen before, we'd be able to say something about it. But we haven't ...which prompted concerns from the local hunters and whaling captains."

The stuff is "gooey" and looks dark against the bright white ice floating in the Arctic Ocean, Brower said.

"It's pitch black when it hits ice and it kind of discolors the ice and hangs off of it," Brower said. He saw some jellyfish tangled up in the stuff, and someone turned in what was left of a dead goose -- just bones and feathers -- to the borough's wildlife department.

"It kind of has an odor; I can't describe it," he said.

Hasenauer said he hasn't heard any reports of waterfowl or marine animals turning up.

Brower said it wouldn't necessarily surprise him if the substance turns out to be some sort of naturally occurring phenomenon, but the borough is waiting until it gets the analysis back from the samples before officials say anything more than they're not sure what it is.

"From the air it looks brownish with some sheen, but when you get close and put it up on the ice and in the bucket, it's kind of blackish stuff ... (and) has hairy strands on it."

Hasenauer said the Coast Guard's samples are being analyzed in Anchorage. Results may be back sometime next week, he said.

The two Coast Guard experts sent up to overfly the area with the borough said they saw nothing that resembled an oil slick, Hasenauer said.

"We brought back one sample of what they believe to be an algae," he said, and a big algae bloom is one possibility.

"It's textbook for us to consider algae because of all the false reports of oil spills we've had in the past. It's one of the things that typically comes up" when a report turns out not to be an oil spill after all.

But, he said, "there's all types of natural phenomena that it could be."

Meanwhile, the brownish-blackish gunk is drifting along the coast to the northeast, Brower said.

"This stuff is moving with the current," he said. "It's now on beyond Barrow and probably going north at this point. And people are still encountering it out here off Barrow."

For the most part, the mystery substance seems to have stayed away from shore.

"We did get some residents saying it was being pushed against the shoreline by ice in some areas," Brower said, "but then we get another east wind and it gets pushed back out there."

Re: the blob has been found

3
Time wrote:Arctic Mystery: Identifying the Great Blob of Alaska

A group of hunters aboard a small boat out of the tiny Alaska village of Wainwright were the first to spot what would eventually be called "the blob." It was a dark, floating mass stretching for miles through the Chukchi Sea, a frigid and relatively shallow expanse of Arctic Ocean water between Alaska's northwest coast and the Russian Far East. The goo was fibrous, hairy. When it touched floating ice, it looked almost black.

But what was it? An oil slick? Some sort of immense, amorphous organism adrift in some of the planet's most remote waters? Maybe a worrisome sign of global climate change? Or, as folks who followed the blob via the Internet wondered, was it something insidious and perhaps even carnivorous like the man-eating jello from the old Steve McQueen movie that inspired the Alaska phenomenon's nickname? (Read Richard Corliss's review of The Thing, a sci-fi film set in the Arctic.)

The hunters got word to the U.S. Coast Guard, which immediately sent two spill-response experts to fly over the mass, which looked sort of rusty from the air. The Coast Guard also approached it by boat. The North Slope Borough, the local government for the vast and sparsely populated cap of Alaska, sent its own people out of the main village of Barrow to have a look. They scooped up jars of the stuff for analysis in a state lab in Anchorage.

"We responded as if it were an oil product," says Coast Guard Petty Officer Terry Hasenauer. "It was described to us as an oil-like substance, thick and lingering below the surface of the water. Those characteristics can indicate heavy, degraded oil, maybe crude oil or possibly an intermediate fuel oil." Meanwhile, the story spread over the Internet like an oil spill, giving lots of people a queasy feeling. (Read about the coming battle for the resources of the Arctic.)

Test results released on July 16 showed that the blob wasn't oil but a plant — a massive bloom of algae. While that may seem less dangerous, people are still uneasy. It's something the mostly Inupiat Eskimo residents along Alaska's northern coast say they cannot remember seeing before. (See pictures of the Arctic.)

Algal blooms are a common and often menacing event along many U.S. coastlines. Some strains are toxic and can close beaches and poison seafood, posing a hazard to consumers. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) maintains a forecasting system for the Gulf of Mexico to warn of harmful Florida blooms. On Thursday, on the other side of the continent, Senator Olympia Snowe, a Maine Republican, urged the NOAA to direct at least $500,000 to assess a disastrous red tide — a form of algal bloom. "The state of Maine is currently besieged by the most virulent red tide event ever recorded in the region," Snowe wrote. "As a result of this outbreak, virtually the entire coast of our state has been closed to the harvest of clams, mussels, ocean quahogs and other shellfish."

While Alaskans may find the algal blob unusual if not frightening, scientists say they are nothing new in Arctic Ocean waters, though the blob itself might be a little weird. Brenda Konar, a marine biology professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, says algal outbreaks can and do occur even in icy Arctic waters. It just takes the right combination of nutrients, light and water temperature, she says. "Algae blooms," she says. "It's sort of like a swimming pool that hasn't been cleaned in a while." The blob, Konar says, is a microalgae made up of "billions and billions of individuals." "We've observed large blooms in the past off Barrow, although none of them at all like this," Barry Sherr, an Oregon State University professor of oceanography, said in an e-mail. "The fact that the locals say they've never seen anything like it suggests that it might represent some exotic species which has drifted into the region, perhaps as a result of global change. For the moment, that's just a guess."

So far in Alaska, nothing suggests that the Chukchi Sea blob is toxic, though the Coast Guard's Hasenauer says toxicity tests are planned. In any case, virtually no commercial seafood production comes from the waters along Alaska's northern coast, but residents do fish, hunt whales and harvest other animals as part of a traditional subsistence lifestyle. In the meantime, the blob for the most part is staying away from the shoreline and slowly drifting farther away.