Travel the dark depths of the ocean floor long enough, and you may come across eerie fields of white, sunken whale bones. These so-called “whale graveyards” can be huge. But none is bigger, deeper, or older than the one just found by a Chinese research team in the southeastern Indian Ocean. Biologists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences identified the remains of nearly 500 whales. Their bones were at the bottom of a trench at a depth of 23,000 feet. Other bones had been scattered by the ocean’s movement. These couldn't be linked to any one skeleton. But there are so many that the research team believes that the remains of over 10 million whales may have settled there over thousands of years. “Discovering a necropolis of this scale was completely unexpected: the size of distribution, the depth and the age range were far beyond anything we had imagined," lead researcher Xiaotong Peng told Agence France-Presse. Peng’s team found that some of the bones dated back more than 5.3 million years. Others belonged to unknown and likely now extinct species. The bones of the dead whales also gave way to new life. When a whale dies, its massive bulk sinks to the bottom of the ocean in an event called a “whale fall.” The fall, in turn, attracts other animals. They then thrive by eating the carcass. Peng’s team documented thousands of creatures in the whale graveyard. They include potentially new species of lobster, jellyfish, and sea cucumber. Reflect: What's something that surprised you recently and how did it change the way you thought about something? Gif of whales from Giphy.
