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."
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