The Associated Press<\/p>\n
ANCHORAGE, Alaska – Well, test results are in – and the verdict on the gooey mystery glob seen floating in the Arctic Ocean off Alaska’s northern shore is: algae.<\/p>\n
Ed Meggert of the Department of Environmental Conservation in Fairbanks said results returned on Thursday showed it’s marine algae – a stringy batch of algae.<\/p>\n
Miles of the thick, dark gunk had been spotted floating between Barrow and Wainwright, prompting North Slope Borough officials and the U.S. Coast Guard to investigate.<\/p>\n
A sample was sent to an Environmental Conservation lab in Palmer.<\/p>\n
The announcement still leaves unanswered questions, such as why is there so much of it in a place where people say they can’t recall anything quite like it?<\/p>\n
Local hunters and whalers are puzzled. The Coast Guard labeled the substance biological, but knew little else. A borough official said the stuff had hairy strands in it and was tangled with jellyfish.<\/p>\n
Terry Whitledge, director of the Institute of Marine Science at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, said he hasn’t had a chance to look at a sample yet, but a friend with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration e-mailed him a picture. He, too, thinks it’s algae, though he said he doesn’t know why an unprecedented bloom appeared off the Arctic coast.<\/p>\n
Coast Guard Petty Officer 1st Class Terry Hasenauer said the North Slope Borough took samples of the stuff for a separate round of testing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Associated Press ANCHORAGE, Alaska – Well, test results are in – and the verdict on the gooey mystery glob seen floating in the Arctic Ocean off Alaska’s northern shore is: algae. Ed Meggert of the Department of Environmental Conservation in Fairbanks said results returned on Thursday showed it’s marine algae – a stringy batch […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-421","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-is-like-science-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeislikesciencefiction.com\/lifeislikescifi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/421","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeislikesciencefiction.com\/lifeislikescifi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeislikesciencefiction.com\/lifeislikescifi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeislikesciencefiction.com\/lifeislikescifi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeislikesciencefiction.com\/lifeislikescifi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=421"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeislikesciencefiction.com\/lifeislikescifi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/421\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeislikesciencefiction.com\/lifeislikescifi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=421"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeislikesciencefiction.com\/lifeislikescifi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=421"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeislikesciencefiction.com\/lifeislikescifi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=421"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}