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A few weeks back, ‘mysterious black balls’ washed up on Coogee Beach in Sydney, Australia and at the time it was evident they were made from what appeared to be organic material but there were only theories on what they could be. Flash forward a few weeks, and testing has determined the mysterious black balls are made of everything from human waste to drugs.
The Sydney black balls were sent to the University of New South Wales in Sydney for testing and the official UNSW Threads account offered an update this week on what they were made out of. Associate Professor Jon Beves found “cooking oil and soap scum, PFAS chemicals, steroidal compounds, antihypertensive medications, pesticides, and veterinary drugs” inside the items… But it got a lot worse.
On Threads, the UNSW account wrote “chemical analysis revealed that the dark, sticky material was composed of a complex mixture of fats, oils, calcium and other metals, inconsistent with typical marine fuel or oil spills.”
Post by @unswView on Threads
From there, things got grosser… they added “the presence of fats, oils, and high calcium levels in the black balls suggests they could potentially be related to fat, oil, and grease blobs commonly formed in sewage systems.” That’s right, black balls of sewage…but not just sewage!
Professor William Alexander Donald added “we had a lot of fun analysing these mystery blobs, using deductive reasoning to trace the likely source to human waste… markers of human faecal waste – like coprostanol – alongside recreational drugs like THC and industrial PFAS ‘forever chemicals’ pointed us to sewage and other sources of urban effluent as the most consistent origins.”
So the ‘mysterious black balls’ that showed up on the beach in Sydney, Australia turned to be fatty blobs of drugs and poop. An article on CNN jokingly referred to them as ‘foul-smelling mini fatbergs‘ which is actually a pretty adept way at describing what they turned out to be in the end.
Post by @unswView on Threads
The thread ends by saying the mystery of where they originated remains unsolved. Nobody knows where the poopy drug balls are coming from…