July 16th, 2009 
Those were the words echoed by U.S. Coast Guard Petty Officer 1st Class Terry Hasenauer, in reference to a strange substance floating in the Arctic near Alaska.
” The stuff is “gooey” and looks dark against the bright white ice floating in the Arctic Ocean, Brower said.
“It’s pitch black when it hits ice and it kind of discolors the ice and hangs off of it,” Brower said. He saw some jellyfish tangled up in the stuff, and someone turned in what was left of a dead goose — just bones and feathers — to the borough’s wildlife department.
“It kind of has an odor; I can’t describe it,” he said.”
…
“From the air it looks brownish with some sheen, but when you get close and put it up on the ice and in the bucket, it’s kind of blackish stuff … (and) has hairy strands on it.”
Looks alot like some sort of algae bloom. Pictures and more text at Anchorage Daily News. I like one commenters hypothesis that it came from one of the melting icebergs. Kind of like this….
[...] Like I said, the Great Alaskan Blob was Palin algae. Preliminary results indicate that it doesn’t look toxic. See Time Magazine: “Algae blooms,” she says. “It’s sort of like a swimming pool that hasn’t been cleaned in a while.” The blob, Konar said, is a microalgae made up of “billions and billions of individuals.” “We’ve observed large blooms in the past off Barrow although none of them at all like this,” Barry Sherr, an Oregon State University professor of oceanography, said in an e-mail. “The fact that the locals say they’ve never seen anything like it suggests that it might represent some exotic species which has drifted into the region, perhaps as a result of global change. For the moment that’s just a guess.” [...]