Photo Credit: newsfeed.time.com
Does anybody know what this stuff is? Neither do some of the sharpest and brightest scientists in the country. NOAA officials are now saying that it’s probably millions of microscopic eggs, but they still can’t say 100% what this “orange goo” actually is, why it showed up on the shores of a small Alaskan village last week, and how it got there.
Recently, a small Alaskan Village, Kivalina, woke up to a whole mess of orange goo along their shoreline. Kivalina is a very remote Alaskan village, located near a reef on the desolate northwest coast of Alaska. The community is comprised of a few hundred Indigenous Insupiat Eskimos. The locals are sincerely worried about the potential impacts to their drinking water supply and why this phenomenon happened in their community. Apparently, the nearby Wulik River, along with another local lagoon, turned colors, and orange water was reported up to 150 miles from Kivalina.
At first no one knew what this “goo” was, and now scientists are saying it’s eggs, or rather, it should be eggs, but of what they do not know. Further investigation is ongoing as to what these eggs are, how they made it to Kivalina, and if they are harmful to humans and non-human species in the area. No one really knows, which is fairly strange in this day and age of scientific knowledge, and quite frankly, kind of scary.
The best current guesstimate out there is that the eggs are some sort of embryos, or some sort of crustacean eggs. But don’t take that as fact because results are still being analyzed in a NOAA laboratory, thus, the mystery is still ongoing. Researchers at the University of Alaska Fairbanks are also looking into the what, where, and how of this orange goo. Until then, NOAA officials say that they should have more detailed answers for the locals and the public shortly, but until then, the mystery of what this is and why it happened will remain unsolved.