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Whales are big creatures. Big creatures have big bodies, and those big bodies are filled with big guts. Lots of big guts. Which brings us to Tomales Bay in California. Last year, as a group of boaters filmed a dead whale, they were witness to an extremely random carcass explosion of disgusting proportions.
When caught on film, whale explosions are hard to look away from. They’re gruesome, certainly, but also incredibly… interesting. The video above was posted to YouTube with very little info in the description in 2020, but blew up (sorry) recently on various websites, garnering some 18 million views to date. Science sites quickly conjectured that the viral whale eruption may simply have been a “gassy” explosion as an animal body naturally decomposes. Whales can apparently hold in gasses, or the “death burp,” for long periods after they die, sometimes resulting in massive and extremely messy explosions. These cellphone cinematographers were just in the right (?) place at the most disgusting time.
Of course the online discussion naturally turned to stories of beached whales being dynamited, only to rain down in enormous, car-crushing chunks of flesh. Take, for example, the most famous of all whale explosions. It happened in Florence, Oregon, which we wrote about just before the event celebrated 50 infamous years. It ended up being such a spectacle that Oregon officials decided to name a park after the event: The Exploding Whale Memorial Park on the Siuslaw River in Old Town, Florence.
The explosion was a bit of a disaster, because the Oregon State Highway Division used too much dynamite. A half-ton, to be precise. Officials hoped the whale would be blown to bits small enough for scavengers to eat. “I’m confident that it’ll work,” George Thornton of the Highway Division said just before they hit the big red button. “The only thing is we’re not sure just exactly how much explosives it’ll take to disintegrate this thing.”
What happened instead though, was… gross. As bystanders stood at what they thought was a safe distance, the countdown began. The whale detonation was caught on film by a news crew, which became, quite possibly, the best piece of reporting that has ever occurred.
“The humor of the situation suddenly gave way to a run for survival as huge chunks of whale blubber fell everywhere,” relayed Paul Linnman, of Oregon’s KATU news, who later said the Oldsmobile-smashing explosion made his career. “Pieces of meat passed high over our heads while others were falling at our feet. The dunes were rapidly evacuated as spectators escaped both the falling debris and the overwhelming smell.”
