Pondering about some herring in Tromsø

To make this headline more grokkable:
Tromsø (Tromsoe): A city in Norway way beyond the Arctic Circle.
Herring: well, just that fish, you know. I like it very much, by the way.
Pondering: Think deeply about a subject or question over a period of time. Notice the emphasis (mine), it is crucial to the topic.

Now the gist of the story:

Tens of thousands of dead herring have carpeted a stretch of coast in northern Norway - and then disappeared again.
The fish appeared on New Year's Eve, leading to speculation that predators might have driven a huge school ashore or the fish could have been washed onto the beach by a powerful storm that hit Norway on Christmas Day.

And here goes the dramatic conclusion of the story:

Locals also started pondering how to clean up the estimated 20 tons of dead fish on the beach in Kvaenes, near Tromsoe, north of the Arctic Circle, before it decayed. But before they could start, the fish disappeared.

Well, there is a catch to that conclusion. The journalist, being of rather more southern extraction, didn't check the timeline of the events carefully. The New Year's Eve, when the fishes decided to fulfill their collective suicide pact, happened in the year 1896. And the disappearance of the said fishes was noticed and recorded only two days ago.

Such are the ways of pondering things beyond the Arctic Circle...