Chemist Identifies Mystery 'Blobs' Washing Up in Newfoundland | Hacker News Reader

Chemist Identifies Mystery 'Blobs' Washing Up in Newfoundland

nytimes.com

73 pointsmykowebhn28 comments

> 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.

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.

Usually it comes from a reasonably common last name Placencia, which comes from a town on the border region between Spain and France.

Friendly picky correction for several different ways of writing it:

  French: Plaisance
  Occitan: Plasença
  Spanish: Plasencia

And some extra trivia: There are a bunch of different French towns named Plaisance, some of them near the Pyrenees, so probably that where the Plasentia name came from, as I saw that it was French and Basque sailors the ones that arrived there.

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.

Mystery Flesh Pit Beach?

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.”

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.

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_...

Those sound like “Star Jelly”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_jelly

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.

http://archive.today/O92yg

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.

[1] http://www.midnightbeach.com/hs/Sleuths.html

So, butylene rubber, a petroleum-based industrial adhesive. Meanwhile, Ottawa thinks it's plant based.

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?

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.

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?

> expert in ‘clandestine dumping’

Do bears clandestinely dump in the woods?

Only when nobody's looking.

Alternately, shipping containers are regularly lost from container ships.

The article doesn't say if this was closer to raw material or waste.

Good point, didn't think about that stuff falls off ships pretty commonly.

Nothing to worry about, it’s just Elon building Galt’s Gulch in the middle of the Canadian wilderness.

It's probably PVA rubber. They don't know where it came from.

http://archive.today/K1FXn

Interestingly something similar (but chemically different) happened in Australia recently too: https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/bondi-beach-tar-balls-...

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)

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...

Didn't hit the jackpot this time, keep trying. The stuff they are chasing is more valuable than gold.

Wait, what are they chasing?

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambergris

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