between wainwright and barrow

The arctic appears to have ejaculated…something:

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 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."

Hairy goo. If you had a dystopian scale, running from Ballardian modernist at one end to Lovecraftian gothic at the other, that detail would definitely put it on the Lovecraftian end of the dial.

Comments

[ejh]

The Thing, surely?

[NomadUK]

Hope they have flamethrowers handy. No well-equipped Arctic or Antarctic station should be without one.

[Richard J]

From Wainwright? I hope we get a heavily inked hand-drawn picture with helpful walking notes.

[ajay]

I was going to ask whether you have some sort of Google News alert set up for stuff like this (heaven knows what keywords it would take) but then noticed that Yves Smith caught it...

I think you should point out that huge doesn't mean, as I imagined, twenty or thirty feet long, but twelve MILES long. Aaargh.

Also this bit:
"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."

Holy crap, it's feeding.

[redpesto]

John Wyndham describibng sea-based hairy goo?