There’s a whale of a graveyard down there in the depths of the Indian Ocean. Photo: YouTube//Screenshot
A research team has discovered a whale graveyard that is staggering in size. The site, which sits in the south east of the Indian Ocean, is about four miles deep and spans nearly 750 miles. It’s located in something called the Diamantina Fracture Zone, which is a sort of underwater mountain range that has been described as “Australia’s deepest and most mysterious area of ocean.”
The team, which consisted of researchers from China, Italy, and New Zealand, is packed full of creatures that the journal Nature said “may be new to science.”
Discovering a necropolis of this scale was completely unexpected,” said Xiaotong Peng, who works with the Chinese Academy of Sciences and was one of the study’s authors. “The size of distribution, the depth and the age range were far beyond anything we had imagined.”
Scientists did 32 dives down to the site, collecting 485 samples from whale fossil sites and active whale falls. A whale fall, for those unaware, is when a whale’s carcass falls to the sea floor, providing a concentrated food source for organisms in the deep sea. One of the most exciting finds was the skull of an extinct whale, a beaked Pterocetus benguelae that is 5.3-million years old. Also of note is the full carcass of an Antarctic minke whale measuring in at 16 feet long.
“Peng and colleagues’ encounter with a vast fossil graveyard is a truly unique discovery,” Stephen J. Godfrey of the Calvert Marine Museum wrote in Nature. “Although the site has limited accessibility, it seems likely to hold many other exciting finds, and it will no doubt inspire more submersible dives in similar environments. Peng and colleagues’ paper reminded me of a trailer for the first in a series of epic movies. I hope that there will be many more of these blockbusters to come.”
