Huge blob of Arctic goo floats past Slope communities: Arctic Alaska | adn.com
http://www.adn.com/2835/story/864687.html

Huge blob of Arctic goo floats past Slope communities http://ow.ly/hoim [from http://twitter.com/KaylinQ/statuses/2662205830]

IT'S NOT OIL: No one in the area can recall seeing anything like it before.

Arctic Goo. (via @djsaki) http://www.adn.com/2835/story/864687.html [from http://twitter.com/vitaminjeff/statuses/2674016789]

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."

I, for one, welcome our new cubic gelatinous overlords.

Historic Polar Images illustrating polar exploration from the nineteenth century onwards, from the Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge.

digitisation project

Historic Polar Images

Lovely site with polar images

The Scott Polar Research Institute in the University of Cambridge holds a world-class collection of photographic negatives illustrating polar exploration from the nineteenth century onwards. Freeze Frame is the result of a two-year digitisation project that brings together photographs from both Arctic and Antarctic expeditions.