A couple weeks ago, NOAA Ocean Exploration team discovered this strange golden orb two miles down on the seafloor off southern Alaska. In further freakiness, the remote vehicle's camera revealed that the mysterious orb had a hole in it.
"Something tried to get in … or to get out," one of the researchers commented on a livestream of the expedition.
The researchers used the robot's arm and host to suck up a sample of this freaky find. And they still can't identify what the hell it is.
"While we were able to collect the 'golden orb' and bring it onto the ship, we still are not able to identify it beyond the fact that it is biological in origin," says OAA Ocean Exploration's Sam Candio. "We likely won't learn more until we are able to get it into a laboratory setting where we can continue to pull from the collective expertise of the scientific community with more sophisticated tools than we are able to maintain on the ship. While somewhat humbling to be stumped by this finding, it serves as a reminder of how little we know about our own planet and how much is left to learn and appreciate about our ocean."
