Terr_8 days ago
> a spongy interior and range in size from a coin to a dinner plate, have been found for miles along Placentia Bay
For a moment I misread that as washing up on Placenta Bay, which would have added a whole extra level of odd.
Come to think of it, that blend of unsettling reproductive metaphors and coastal desolation would fit in the game Death Stranding.
ikiris8 days ago
You don’t want to live on the shores of anywhere named placenta bay.
There’s guaranteed to be a historical reason for a name that out there, and not in a way that’s good for property value or sunset watching.
yencabulator7 days ago
Usually it comes from a reasonably common last name Placencia, which comes from a town on the border region between Spain and France.
tecleandor3 days ago
Friendly picky correction for several different ways of writing it:
French: Plaisance
Occitan: Plasença
Spanish: Plasencia
The Spanish city of Plasencia is quite far away from the Basque Country, in Extremadura, so probably they weren't referring (or remembering) that concrete city.
jacoblambda3 days ago
Mystery Flesh Pit Beach?
gcr7 days ago
TL;DR: Rubber. Industrial adhesive. Nobody knows why this is there or who is responsible yet.
> I’m quite confident that the sample that I handled was PVA butylene rubber,” [Dr. Kozak] said in a phone interview, describing a mix of synthetic rubber and polyvinyl acetate, known as PVA. That polymer, he said, is “the active ingredient in white glue — the kind of white glue you have at home is a very dilute, kid-friendly version of this stuff.”
> Globs of the white sticky substance, which have a spongy interior and range in size from a coin to a dinner plate, have been found for miles along Placentia Bay since at least September
> Dr. Kozak said that one of the first things he noticed was that the blob had “a kind of petrochemical odor to it, kind of like if you walk down the turpentine aisle of your hardware store.”
mapt3 days ago
A number of these sorts of "What is this" posts on Reddit about mysterious yellowish blobs, end up being polyurethane expanding foam.
They float, and their default state is "mysterious blob", the only action necessary to create this is to puncture the aerosol container. Most people who use them end up throwing away an aerosol container that's still half full, but which has hardened at the dispenser tip.
jvan3 days ago
I had hoped from the headline that it would shed some light on the Oakville blobs[0], but no such luck. The images don't look remotely the same material.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oakville,_Washington#Oakville_...
crazydoggers3 days ago
Those sound like “Star Jelly”
bjamesking3 days ago
I live in rural Newfoundland. There was a Newfoundland post on 4chan /pol/ today and now this. Not something I see very often.
We have some very unusual community names. Come by chance, Goobies, Cow Head, Grannies Hole, Blow me Down, Spread Eagle, and of course the famous Dildo.
chaghalibaghali8 days ago
mdek8 days ago
This reminds me of a very old video game "Science Sleuths"[1] I ran into as a kid, where you had to identify a blob on the beach.
runjake3 days ago
It's probably PVA rubber. They don't know where it came from.
tiahura8 days ago
So, butylene rubber, a petroleum-based industrial adhesive. Meanwhile, Ottawa thinks it's plant based.
NotSammyHagar8 days ago
the article doesn't say it, but this all suggests someone probably had a bunch of old crap in a tank and dumped in the ocean. Maybe it was a giant ocean liner amount of it. Right? Why does no one want to just say that outright?
Scoundreller8 days ago
Mostly because the article is about a chemist focussed on identifying WTF it is and less so an expert in shipping/unreported damage/clandestine dumping.
whythre3 days ago
Seems like goofy credentialism. Large amounts of this stuff don’t just appear; someone put it there. Why do we need an expert in ‘clandestine dumping’ to tell us that?
akira25013 days ago
> expert in ‘clandestine dumping’
Do bears clandestinely dump in the woods?
guerrilla3 days ago
Only when nobody's looking.
chasil7 days ago
Alternately, shipping containers are regularly lost from container ships.
The article doesn't say if this was closer to raw material or waste.
NotSammyHagar5 days ago
Good point, didn't think about that stuff falls off ships pretty commonly.
labster3 days ago
Nothing to worry about, it’s just Elon building Galt’s Gulch in the middle of the Canadian wilderness.
chaghalibaghali8 days ago
Interestingly something similar (but chemically different) happened in Australia recently too: https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/bondi-beach-tar-balls-...
askvictor3 days ago
These turned out to be fatbergs (i.e. sewerage that hadn't broken down due to people flushing so-called 'flushable' wipes down the toilet)
divbzero7 days ago
On the other side of the world, mystery “balls” washing up in Australia appear to have a very different origin:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-11-07/what-were-black-balls...
pvaldes3 days ago
Didn't hit the jackpot this time, keep trying. The stuff they are chasing is more valuable than gold.
Loughla3 days ago
Wait, what are they chasing?
scbenet3 days ago
Can't read the article due to paywall, but potentially ambergris? It's a form of whale excrement that washes up on the shore and can sell for ~$10k USD/pound
KameltoeLLM3 days ago
[flagged]