10.
SPACE DEBRIS
This image of a space-age-like structure on what appears to be an Arctic beach probably
isn’t real -- we weren’t able to trace it to anything that’s actually known to
exist.
But it’s a great way to get a conversation going about real instances of space debris
appearing along coastlines, right?
Take, for example, the time when a vacationer discovered parts from a SpaceX rocket during
a trip to the Bahamas.
During a getaway in 2015, Kevin Eichelberger and his friends noticed something strange
in the water, approaching the beach.
It turned out to be pieces of barnacle-covered wreckage from the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket booster,
which had exploded and crash-landed just weeks earlier.
The group quickly figured out what it was and Tweeted to Elon Musk to let him know about
their discovery.
Musk replied a few days later thanking the friends for passing on the news, but he seemed
uninterested in retrieving the debris.
Echelberger and his buddies left it sitting on the beach -- after all, what else were
they going to do with it?
And as exciting as it was to find the discarded hunks of metal, locals were concerned about
how to remove it and how much it would cost, especially since there’s no dump on Elbow
Cay, the small island it washed up on.
Shortly after that, SpaceX soon announced plans to come get the parts and properly dispose
of them.
9.
PIG-FACED SHARK
Social media users went into a frenzy in September when naval officers on the Italian island
of Elba posted photos of a dead shark with an eerily pig-like face.
They had just discovered the carcass and apparently thought its homely face was interesting enough
to share with the world.
The creature is not deformed, like you might be thinking.
It’s an angular roughshark, and it’s what they all look like.
Some people call it a “pig fish,” not only because it looks like one, but because
it emits a pig-like grunt when it’s removed from the water.
The species is common in the Mediterranean, but like most sharks, it’s vulnerable to
the fishing industry.
Its numbers have been declining for decades, and it’s one step away from becoming endangered
on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List.
The angular roughshark is one of many strange sharks that have been found in the region.
In 2019, a one-foot-long (30.5 cm) shark missing its teeth and its outermost layer of skin
was found near Sardinia, Italy.
After ruling out that it was a newly discovered species, experts were shocked to realize that
the creature had lived for around three years.
It grew at a normal rate, lived a relatively normal life, and was well-fed despite its
ailments.
Researchers concluded that the so-called “naked” shark had a genetic mutation.
They are unsure whether the mutation was natural or caused by chemical pollution, and said
that they planned to continue investigating the matter.
8.
BEACHED BRAINS
During his daily morning walk along the beach in Racine, Wisconsin one day last year, local
resident Jimmy Senda spotted an object on the ground wrapped in aluminum and secured
with a rubber band.
Upon taking a closer look, he saw what looked like a human brain!
To make things even weirder, the bundle also contained flowers and what appeared to be
Chinese currency.
Nearby city workers took a look and agreed with the baffled beachcomber that the object
resembled a brain.
Senda called the police, and they, too, agreed with his assessment.
The Racine County Medical Examiner’s office determined that it was a brain, but it didn’t
belong to a human.
But it was still undeniably disturbing, since someone had clearly taken the time to wrap
it up, and considering the items it was found with.
Nobody knows how and why the bizarre collection of objects ended up on the beach in Racine,
or who might’ve left them there.
Senda wasn’t exactly thrilled by the alarming discovery that interrupted his peaceful morning
stroll, but he told Fox 6 News that he was also glad for it in a weird way, because it
prevented any children from finding it.
True dat Jimmy, true dat.
7.
LIEPAJA NORTHERN FORTS
The Latvian coast is home to the ruins of a collection of crumbling concrete bunkers.
Known as the Northern Forts, they were built by Tsarist Russia between the 19th and 20th
centuries.
The long abandoned structures once surrounded the entire coastal city of Liepaja and were
part of its central fortress.
They were abandoned in 1908, barely a decade after they were finished being built, because
they were deemed to be a “strategic mistake,” according to Latvia’s official travel website.
Authorities tried to blow the bunkers up with explosives in the past, but were only partially
successful.
The ruins that survived the blast remain in place today, dotting the shoreline.
But it appears as though the Baltic Sea may complete the unfinished demolition work as
the unforgiving saltwater takes a toll on the structures.
Some of the shelters have collapsed.
Others are still standing, but their days are arguably numbered in a losing battle against
the elements.
The site is open to visitors with guided tours, including one that has tourists play a game
called “Escape From the USSR.”
It entails a mock scenario where participants have to rescue a friend who was captured by
the Soviets.
Are you up for a round, or does this not sound like your cup of tea?
Let us know in the comments below, and if you’re liking this video, be sure to hit
the thumbs up and subscribe buttons if you haven’t already!
:)
6.
DEAD SEAL COLONY
In September 2020, Cape fur seals began turning up dead in large numbers on the Namibian coast.
By mid-October, somewhere between 5,000 and 7,000 adult females appeared to have miscarried.
Speaking with Reuters, Naude Dreyer of Ocean Conservation Namibia explained that most of
the carcasses belonged to dead mother seals, rather than pups.
Scientists were at a loss to explain the mass die-off.
They theorized that pollution, a bacterial infection, and/or malnutrition may have played
a role.
Some of the bodies were emaciated or at least thin with very little fat reserves, according
to Dr. Tess Gridley of the Namibian Dolphin Project.
This wasn’t the first time seals have perished en masse in Namibia.
Back in 1994, around 10,000 dead seals and 15,000 fetuses appeared along the shore.
A food shortage and bacteria were the suspected causes of death, but it seems as though experts
failed to conclusively determine what happened.
5.
NARLUGA SKULL
Back in 1990, a hunter noticed three unusual looking whales swimming off the coast of western
Greenland.
He managed to collect one of the creatures’ skulls, and it was unlike anything he had
ever seen before.
The animal had both beluga-like teeth and a bottom set of narwhal-like chompers, but
it lacked the characteristic narwhal “horn” that the species is famous for.
Narwhal researcher Mads Peter Heide-Jørgensen suspected that the skull belonged to a hybrid
between a narwhal and a beluga, or a “narluga.”
Some researchers disagreed, instead theorizing that the animal was a deformed beluga.
At the time, DNA technology wasn’t advanced enough to glean any genetic information about
the weird whale.
The skull sat in storage for decades at the Natural History Museum of Denmark until a
curator decided to take a fresh look at it in 2015.
Technology had come a long way since the ‘90s, and, and scientists managed to extract some
DNA.
As it turned out, the creature was, in fact, a narluga, with a narwhal mother and a beluga
father.
The skull is the first telltale evidence that a narluga hybrid was even a real thing.
Before then, scientists thought it was nearly impossible for the two species to mate.
Their shared gene flow appears to have diverged over a million years ago, and it’s highly
unusual for such distantly related animals to procreate with one another.
An isotope analysis of its diet revealed that the creature probably dove even deeper than
its parents in search of prey.
Aside from these rudimentary details, not much is known about narlugas, and it could
be a very long time before researchers get the chance to observe one of these extremely
rare hybrids in the wild.
4.
RUBBER DUCK
While vacationing in the Russian Arctic two years ago, Vladimir Matusevitch noticed a
dirty rubber duck inscribed with the number 1417 resting on some beach rocks.
He knew that it probably came from a rubber duck race -- yes, it’s a real thing -- but
these events are not common in Russia.
Matusevitch scoured duck racing event pages and groups on social media to try finding
out where the one he found came from, and even created a Facebook page dedicated to
his search.
He sent countless messages to duck race organizers, and his hard work recently finally paid off.
Monika Iverson, who helps organize the Ardmore Duck Race in Alberta, Canada, received a message
from Matusevitch in 2019 but didn’t notice it until this year.
She instantly recognized her handwriting on the duck and knew it was from the Ardmore
event.
When asked by CBC News if she was sure it was her duck, she said that she was 150 percent
sure.
The duck entered the water in June 2017.
Two years later, Matusevitch found it more than 6,200 miles (10,000 km) away.
The annual Ardmore Duck Race has been going on for over 30 years.
Local firefighters help collect the ducks at the end of the race, so it’s rare for
one to stray into the vast open sea.
But number 1417 must have somehow slipped by unnoticed and continued its journey down
the Churchill River, which empties into Hudson Bay.
Ocean current expert Paul Myers explained in a CBC interview that the duck probably
drifted through the Hudson Strait, around Quebec, and into the Labrador Sea, where it
was swept away by the Gulf Stream.
From there, it likely passed between Iceland and Scotland, then up the Norwegian coast
to the Russian Arctic.
The traveling toy has seen more in the past two years than many of us get to experience
in our entire lifetime, and it will finally be traveling back home to Alberta soon.
3.
GIANT SNOWBALLS
Locals were baffled in late 2016 when giant, nearly perfectly round balls of snow and ice
littered an 11-mile (18 km) stretch of coastline in northwestern Siberia’s Gulf of Ob.
The strange spheres ranged from 2.7 inches (6.9 cm) -- about the size of a tennis ball
-- to as much as three feet (1 meter) in diameter.
This has happened elsewhere, including along Lake Michigan, where boulder-sized ice balls
weighing up to 50 pounds (22 kg) each have appeared on the shore.
In fact, they appear fairly regularly in the region, according to Sleeping Bear Dunes National
Lakeshore deputy superintendent Tom Ulrich.
To the typical onlooker, these frozen orbs seem too flawlessly round to be anything but
manmade.
But they are actually the product of a rare but naturally occurring phenomenon.
Known as concretions, they form in a similar way to how a person makes a snowball.
They start out as slush and small pieces of ice and grow as they are rolled by the wind
in frigid water, sometimes becoming enormous in the process.
The waves roll them ashore and deposit them on land as the tide recedes.
2.
STRANGE SHIPWRECK
While draining a man-made salt lake along Namibia’s Skeleton Coast in 2008, a group
of miners and geologists noticed pieces of wood and metal scattered along the shore.
Soon after that, they discovered a buried shipwreck!
Experts believe that it’s the Portuguese vessel Bom Jesus, which vanished along with
its crew in 1533 while sailing from Lisbon to India.
It’s the oldest wreck ever found in southern Africa.
It was also the first wreck in the region that was found laden with treasure, including
gold coins and over 100 elephant tusks.
A recent study traced the ivory to the African forest elephant.
The species is native to the humid forests of West Africa and the Congo Basin.
Until recently, scientists believed that they left their natural habitat for the dry savannah
as recently as the early 20th century, when overhunting and the ivory trade eradicated
savannah elephants and opened up their territory to populations from elsewhere.
But the 500-year-old tusks found on the Bom Jesus probably came from elephants that were
killed near the coast, indicating that the creatures may have left the rainforest as
early as the 16th century.
The findings surprised experts, who previously thought that ivory came from elephant species
who stayed within different regions and habitats.
But the study puts the animals in a mixed environment, showing that they ditched the
humid forests of Central and West Africa long before hunters came along and nearly drove
them to extinction.
By learning more about the history of elephant hunting and the creatures’ movement, researchers
can better address concerns revolving around the illegal ivory trade today.
1.
MASSIVE PIPES
2017 was an eventful year along the Norfolk, England coast.
Several months after $60 million worth of cocaine washed ashore, a dozen massive plastic
pipe segments appeared on the beach.
They were 8 feet in diameter, with the longest pipe measuring 1,574 feet (480 meters) long.
The titanic tubes were being transported from Norway to Algeria when the ship they were
on got into an accident with a container ship.
They became loose and fell off, and the waves carried them to land.
The Maritime and Coastguard Agency reassured the public that the pipes did not pose any
public health or safety hazards.
But the Norwegian company that manufactured the stranded goods warned people to stay away
from the segments to avoid possibly being crushed by them.
The statement came after social media users began posting pictures of themselves standing
on top of the pipes.
Pipelife export manager Trygve Blomster told The Guardian that the tubes are especially
dangerous when moving around in water.
All it would take is a person falling off one and having it rolled on top of them by
the waves.
Not to mention, the 8-foot fall alone would be unavoidably painful.
The good news is that the pipes weren’t dangerous to the environment and nobody ended
up being crushed by one.
Thanks for watching!
What’s the weirdest thing you ever found on a beach?
Let us know in the comments below and don’t forget to subscribe if you haven’t already!
See you next time!
Bye! :)