Google Sightseeing takes you on tour of the world as seen from satellite, using the free Google Earth program, or Google Maps in your web browser. Each weekday your guides James and Alex present new weird and wonderful sights as suggested by readers.
Just off the coast of St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands, is what looks rather like a Rum Slick – waste from the production of molasses at the nearby Cruzan Rum Distillery.
Certainly the dark patch starts directly offshore from the point where the distance is shortest between the distillery and the sea – but surely it would be madness to so obviously pollute such beautiful waters, especially when the island’s economy relies so heavily on tourism?
Thanks to Joshua Germany.
This form supports simple HTML, but URLs will be automatically linked.
Link to specific places with a Google Maps link, or with a latitude and longitude written like this:
lat/lng:55.9494,-3.2000
If you've found something that you think should be posted in its own entry then use the suggestion form!
Want your own icon? Get a Gravatar.
bio” 
The weirdest and best of Google Earth is now available in the…
couldn’t it just be a big cloud or even a large school of fishes? I doubt the island government (which in a way is also the U.S. government) would allow rum over tourism
Seaweed?
A Clerks convention?
there is a serious chance it could be pollution of some description (I very much doubt it is rum or rum related), the reliance on tourism is no deterrent, the caribbean is littered with examples of severe cock-ups – antigua regularly pump 1 million gallons of fresh water into the sea thereby destroying nearby coral reefs – the reason being the de-salination plant is state of the art and produces more water than the older waterpipes can handle, the water cant be stored as there is no storage facilities and so it gets pumped back into the sea, hot and sterile.
Thats a nice place to scuba.
Dont know what these are but there seems to be three of them dotted round the island!
One here:
Placemark: Google Maps / Google Earth
and another one here:
Placemark: Google Maps / Google Earth
and one more:
Placemark: Google Maps / Google Earth
I’m presuming they are perhaps schools and built to a standard design or some sort of government building.
St. Croix is home to a major oil refinery (see the big tanks just to the northeast). I’m afraid this may be some sort of oil spill. It’s possible that the spill was cut off further east-northeast and what was left has moved to here.
Mmmmm.. bet that water tastes funny!
Clearly it’s just a rift in the fabric of space.
If you scroll west along the coast, there are some docks next to what appear to be large oil barrels on the shore. The water in between the docks seems to be the same color as the dark patch shown here. Obviously color detail is minimal, but perhaps these are related.
cookie monster- yeah, they’re probably schools. The high schools in the next county over from where I live are next to indistinguishable so I see no reason why these schools might not be.
certainly a slick, doubtful it is rum….more likely oil
cool,a nice piace
Dont oil float on surface?? doesnt look like it is floating to me? does look like a spill of some sort
That really is the waste from the Cruzan Rum factory and not from the refinery (lived on the island). The southside of St Croix has no tourism and what little tourism on the island is on the North Shore.
I also lived on island for a bit. You should see it from UNDERWATER. Believe it or not, the chemicals aren’t the worst part of the sludge – it’s the temperature. it gets dumped at about 150 degrees, which kills most of the life on the south side. they have some cooling stills at Cruzan, but not nearly enough. I actually asked them why they don’t cool/filter it better, and they assured me that there was no harm in their actions. Bad as they are, it’s still an excellent rum!
Its FISH
Looks like a nice place to scuba so I hope it’s not pollution. But honestly by the picture, I don’t necessarily think it’s pollution. Of course Chris above me says it is, which is really sad.
Fun fact: St. Croix used to be a Danis-Norwegian colony, but got sold to the US for a handful of dollars.
Many years ago I was an officer cadet on a tanker that used to bring Molasses from various places in the Caribbean to a yeast plant in Harvey, LA – right across the river from New Orleans. After pumping the cargo ashore, we’d wash the tanks with hot river water and pump the warm sugary water back into the river. All the local fishermen knew what we’d be doing when we came in, and while we were cleaning, there’d always be a bunch of little boats just down-river from us fishing for all the fish that were attracted by the sugar in the water.
It was perfectly legal…. think of it as “chumming” for catfish
Richard