Experts weren't wrong when they said the ocean remains one of the most mysterious entities to humans on Earth. The latest discovery made by researchers proves that claim - a mysterious golden orb has been found at the bottom of Pacific coast, and scientists are baffled.
The object was discovered off the coast of Alaska by a remote-controlled submarine explorer, at a depth of two miles down into the ocean. According to scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) in the United States, it could be a hatched egg or even a marine sponge. They're running tests and a DNA analysis to try to determine what the shiny object could be. But so far, all Noaa can tell us for sure is that it feels like "skin tissue." To make matters even more mysterious, scientists found a hole in the object, which some team members theorized could have been caused by a creature hatching, or by a predator trying to break in. "I just hope when we poke it, something doesn’t decide to come out," one researcher shared. "It's like the beginning of a horror movie."
Images taken from inside the waters of the ocean showed the object to be golden, but photos of it in the lab suggest it has a brown-yellow hue. There are numerous marine species, such as sharks, that lay their eggs on the sea floor, which makes them less vulnerable to being washed away by currents. "We’ll often see new things but will usually have a pretty good knowledge of what they are. What’s unusual about this thing is we’re not even sure what it is. Is it an egg, is it a sponge, what is it?" says Professor Kerry Howell, who works as a deep-sea ecologist at the University of Plymouth. "We’re going with egg because of the texture. It felt fleshy and it doesn’t have any obvious anatomy. It has a hole in it that suggests something has come in or gone out. But it doesn’t look like any egg I’ve ever seen."
This golden orb, likely an egg casing, struck an imaginative chord for many watching yesterday.
— NOAA Ocean Exploration (@oceanexplorer) August 31, 2023
Today we dive on Denson Seamount. ROVs are launching & will remain on the seafloor until ~ 3:45pm ADKT/7:45pm EDT.
Join us! https://t.co/ScOhpINB18#Okeanos #seascapealaska #explore pic.twitter.com/Eq1sYeVQrr
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"If it is an egg, the really interesting question is whose egg is it. It’s quite big. That’s not a small fish egg. That’s a sizeable thing," she added. Stay tuned as we find out more about this puzzling mystery...
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