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.
A mysterious glob of unknown material up to 12 miles long has appeared off Alaska's northern coast. Coast Guard Petty Officer 1st Class Terry Hasenauer says, "It's certainly biological. It's definitely not an oil product of any kind."
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."
NOW .. Asia and Pacific face El Nino Updated July 13, 2009 11:32:27
Climate experts say an El Nino weather pattern is developing, threatening more drought and forest fires in Indonesia and Australia.
An El Nino pattern takes place every two to seven years, and is seen by scientists as part of a natural climate cycle. It occurs when waters in the east Pacific Ocean heat up, resulting in moist air moving to the east and leading to drier conditions in the western Pacific.
Presenter: Sen Lam Speakers: Stewart Franks, Associate Professor in Environmental Engineering, University of Newcastle
FRANKS: The El Nino is a process that basically builds up over time and where we are at at the moment, what we're seeing are the signs of developing El Nino conditions. I know the Australian Bureau of Meterology cast that about 60 percent chance that we will go through to a full mature El Nino. That probably is a reasonably good estimate. That's about four times more likely than the long term average.
LAM: So generally though, it is not very good news for Australia, because parts of southern Australia have had a long running drought?
FRANKS: Yes, that's right. Since about 2002, we've actually had a string of El Ninos that did bring drought across eastern Australia. We've since had a couple of La Nina years which have restored the water and in the soils and the reservoirs to some degrees in the northern part of eastern Australia, but the southwest is very dry. So any El Nino or even a chance of an El Nino is obviously very bad news for those places that are already in deficit.
LAM: How serious is this for Australia?
FRANKS: To be honest, we did have those, the last two years have been La Ninas. We were looking at, for instance, Sydney's metropolitan water supply was down to quite critical levels, many major towns, such as Brisbane in Queensland were at very critical levels. We did get a lot of useful rainfall in the last two years, so this El Nino will not threaten major water supplies of the major cities, but of course, when you have a string of very bad drought years as we've had since 2002, the La Nina brought rainfall, but also many floods in northern Australia, then clearly agriculture has been suffering and so if we do have another drought, it's just misery on top of misery I am afraid.
LAM: Yes, well, in broader regional terms, do you think it might have an adverse impact on agriculture in Asia?
FRANKS: Well, undoubtedly if we do get a full mature El Nino, and if it is reasonably strong, then as you said, in your introduction, the destruction across Indonesia you get a lot of drought across Indonesia and that would persist through to about February or March. And eastern Australia obviously, but also in the Pacific Islands. It's actually a bit of a mixed picture in the Pacific Islands, but the equatorial islands actually get much wetter conditions, but I guess other parts of Polynesia also have the drought. So yes, it is a regionally impacting phenomenon and of course, a lack of something as fundamental as water is always bad.
LAM: But of course just as it caused droughts in Australia, I understand that El Nino can also cause quite destructive rainfall in parts of Asia?
FRANKS: Yes, that's right. Again it really depends where you are, it really depends on location. What El Nino does is tends to not so much change weather patterns as such, but just shift them around a bit. So depending on where you are, you might actually have what would appear quite unusual weather and that is because it has been shifted, because there's this large scale motion, this process in the Pacific Ocean.
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