A camera pans the craggy Pacific Ocean floor. A crab lies motionless, its spindly legs sprawled into the dirt. From under a rock overhang, there's a glimmer of purple. "Do you have that dark purple blob on the left?" asks a scientist, one of eight controlling a remotely operated underwater robot, to which the camera is attached. "Purple blob," one replies. "Oh. . . what is that?" "I actually have no idea. I have no idea what that is."
"This unidentified purple orb stumped our scientists onboard." The scientists watching the blob were part of a crew on the exploration vessel Nautilus, operated by the Ocean Exploration Trust. Earlier this month, they were navigating the tectonically active areas of the Channel Islands off the coast of California, when they came across a mysterious organism. Their surprised and confused first impressions were captured on video. "This unidentified purple orb stumped our scientists onboard," the team wrote on their website.
No comments:
Post a Comment