Word: alaska
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...group of hunters aboard a small boat out of the tiny Alaska village of Wainwright were the first to spot what would eventually be called "the blob." It was a dark, floating mass stretching for miles through the Chukchi Sea, a frigid and relatively shallow expanse of Arctic Ocean water between Alaska's northwest coast and the Russian Far East. The goo was fibrous, hairy. When it touched floating ice, it looked almost black...
...some of the planet's most remote waters? Maybe a worrisome sign of global climate change? Or, as folks who followed the blob via the Internet wondered, was it something insidious and perhaps even carnivorous like the man-eating jello from the old Steve McQueen movie that inspired the Alaska phenomenon's nickname? (Read Richard Corliss's review of The Thing, a sci-fi film set in the Arctic...
...word to the U.S. Coast Guard, which immediately sent two spill-response experts to fly over the mass, which looked sort of rusty from the air. The Coast Guard also approached it by boat. The North Slope Borough, the local government for the vast and sparsely populated cap of Alaska, sent its own people out of the main village of Barrow to have a look. They scooped up jars of the stuff for analysis in a state lab in Anchorage...
Test results released on July 16 showed that the blob wasn't oil but a plant - a massive bloom of algae. While that may seem less dangerous, people are still uneasy. It's something the mostly Inupiat Eskimo residents along Alaska's northern coast say they cannot remember seeing before. (See pictures of the Arctic...
...Alaska! She made her declaration on Independence Day weekend as a symbol, she says, of her new and exhilarating freedom. She's headed to a bookstore, a television set, a convention hall near you, armed with an anti-résumé. Cut loose from her obligations to her huge and awesome homeland, her message remains quintessentially Alaskan. Where she comes from - the last American frontier - the past is irrelevant, the rules are suspended, and limitations are for losers...