(July 17) -- Dark blobs are lurking in the sea off Alaska's North Slope.
What sounds like a sci-fi movie was a real mystery. Scientists, initially puzzled, have figured out what the floating goo is. But they still don't know why it's there.
Hunters and fishermen became concerned when they spotted the stuff last week. Gordon Brower was among the local officials who went out to take a look. They all returned baffled. No one had ever seen anything like it.
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"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," Brower, who works for the North Slope Borough's Planning and Community Services Department, told the Anchorage Daily News.
There was only one thing officials knew for sure -- it wasn't an oil slick.
"It's certainly biological," Coast Guard Petty Officer 1st Class Terry Hasenauer told the newspaper earlier this week. "It has no characteristics of an oil, or a hazardous substance, for that matter."
Hasenauer sent samples to the State Environmental Health Laboratory in Anchorage, which discovered the goop "primarily contained marine algae," according to a brief report issued Thursday by Analytical Chemistry Manager Emanuel Hignutt Jr.
There's still a mystery surrounding the blobs. No one along the North Slope has ever encountered the stuff in the ocean before, and scientists don't know what produced this bizarre algae bloom.
