Orange Goo Invades Alaskan Village

s31523 writes "When the residents of the Alaskan village of Kivalina woke up last week, the unexpected sight of an orange goo covering the surface of the water was quite alarming. Suspecting a oil spill or some other man-made disaster, the residents worried about the toxicity of the substance. After NOAA investigated, it was found the that goo is an unknown type of microscopic eggs. According to NOAA scientist Keep Rice, 'We now think these are some sort of small crustacean egg or embryo, with a lipid oil droplet in the middle causing the orange color.' More work is needed to identify what the eggs are and what caused them to show up."

Comments

Re:Reports say it's crustacean eggs.

[ultramk]

They say that when they dry up, they turn powdery and blow away. So some blow onto the beach, dry into a powder, and blow around town, sticking to anything that's wet, including rain buckets.

You know, either that or they're really from outer space and this is chapter one of some sort of Robin Cook novel. All things considered, I'm gonna stick with the wind theory.

Re:Ocean Temperatures

[SETIGuy]

In recent years (10-15) the warming is far below any noise level.

In any 10 to 15 year period the warming is below the noise level, because we're talking about a global average of about 0.15C per decade, and changes in heat transfer from ocean to atmosphere from year to year cause variations that are larger than that. But, even with the annual variations over the last decade, the warming trend is still apparent. http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-cooling-january-2007-to-january-2008.htm

But even though the global trend is 0.15C per decade that doesn't mean that changes in specific places haven't been much larger.