Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/08/02/austalian-waterway-mysteriously-turned-electric-blue.html
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@admin Typo in the headline. “Austalian”
Edit: Fixed! Thank you!
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Austalia sounds quite nice, though. Kinda like Australia without all the deadly stuff but with Mediterranean cuisine.
I think I’d like to go there for a holiday.
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It’s never mysterious when the waterways in Austalia are blue - they are always that color!
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seems a wee-bit premature to apply the “benign” label prior to even excluding copper compounds [squeen]
Queensland Fire and Rescue apparently tested the water and determined the coloring to be “benign” but it’s still a bizarre mystery.
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"It does look like copper contamination, which would be very easy to test for and confirm. In some cases, copper has been used as an algaecide in ponds (to kill nuisance algae), but these pictures would imply very excessive dosing, if it is copper.
(any mine ‘tailings’ upstream? methylene blue mayhaps?)
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“But copper is antibacterial!”
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Is “Humpybong Creek” the most Aussie name ever?
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Reminds me of Rio Celeste in Costa Rica:
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Humpybong Creek
Well, there’s your problem.
Bong water having been humped to the point of added liquids appearing, may turn this colour.
Alternatively, they need a Bluewater purifier. (Yeah, link is to corporate site for company that is actually called Bluewater and makes water purifiers.)
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An Australian band, no less:
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It looks less like copper to me and more like someone dumped in a few hundred pounds of blue raspberry Kool-Aid.
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Showing ze full postings:
Australian waterway mysteriously turned electric blue
Allan Rose Hill 8:32 am Fri Aug 2, 2024
image: Yahoo!/social media
The water in Humpybong Creek near Brisbane, Australia has turned electric blue and nobody knows why or how. Queensland Fire and Rescue apparently tested the water and determined the coloring to be “benign” but it’s still a bizarre mystery.
“There are various microorganisms (bacteria and algae) that can produce some very intense colours in water, including bright greens, pinks and reds,” University of Sydney civil engineer Stuart Khan told Yahoo! News. "But I am not familiar with a microorganism producing this color.
“It does look like copper contamination, which would be very easy to test for and confirm. In some cases, copper has been used as an algaecide in ponds (to kill nuisance algae), but these pictures would imply very excessive dosing, if it is copper. And yes, if it is copper, it’s very toxic to fish and many invertebrate species, so it would have significant ecological impacts.”
Apparently some residents joked that it was the result of a gender reveal stunt. But maybe they weren’t joking.
It’s getting silly, now.
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It sounds like it’d be right at home in the Spy x Family universe which is already home to Westalis and Ostania, which are loosely based on Cold War East and West Germany:
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Maybe Tobias went for a swim on holiday?
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Reminds me of various incidents of food dye spills from factories.
Edit: I thought of this, first, so I’m just gonna put it here:
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All that and no Eiffel 65?
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