Happy Exploding Whale Day Everyone! Actually we celebrate this holiday here on the 12th of November every year. My politically-aware family is still somewhat pissed off at the Pilgrims and celebrating surviving the Trump Years may be premature. So we have just stopped doing the Thanksgiving thing. Nancy and I are probably going to work most of the day, and we won’t see Lila until next week. Its always way too close to my Birthday which I have always resented.
So we celebrate the anniversary of one of the greatest examples of clueless stupidity of the 20th Century. I almost witnessed this in person along with other new friends at the Student Research Center at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. Our lab leaders Bruce and Dave both had Military experience including explosive handling - Dave was a Vietnam Vet and Bruce was in the Coast Guard. Both advised us to avoid this like the plague and they were spot-on.
See for yourself:
This was memorialized in song:
Whale strandings are always disturbing but these are also nothing new. I know of a site in the eastern Willamette Valley that was discovered by Dr. William Orr and curator emeritus of the Condon Museum. He told me this story when he was the President of the Paleontological Society. Billl also plays bluegrass on banjo I recall and is quite good at it!
He documented a late-Oligocene to Miocene shoreline by flying all over the edges of the Willamette Valley in the fall and mapping the stripe of land where the Big Leaf Maples were slightly brighter reddish-orange than adjacent maples. You can see this when the conditions are just right. This anomaly is due to the increased calcium in the soils from the shoreline stranding of seashells mostly, such as is seen on any beach, especially Sanibel in Florida. There were places where things abruptly ended and then continued to the Northwest, offset by fault activity.
These shorelines were then confirmed on the ground. Just down the hill from his house near Scotts Mills he showed me some basaltic seastacks surrounded by mudstones with barnacles still attached where they lived. He pointed out the hill to the northwest and one can see a shape similar to the windswept and wave-cut headlands on the Oregon Coast. In many cases however he had to knock on some farmer’s door and ask if he could show up with his backhoe and dig down some 3-4 meters in some out of the way spot to see what might be down there. He never had to go too deep and he almost always encountered these fossil strand lines.
At one farm somewhere near Silverton he discovered fully articulated whale skeletons ranked shoulder to shoulder and extending some distance. He basically located a fossil whale stranding similar to some of the larger strandings of Pygmy Sperm Whales that occasionally happen on the Oregon Coast and elsewhere involving over 50 individuals. The cause for these tragic events remains unsolved. Is it disease? Fleeing a predator? Psychosis and Mass Suicide? Satyagraha? Confusion? Following a leader? A stampede into oblivion (whales and cows are not that distantly related)? Or just plain stupidity like so many Anti-vaxxers today? We still do not have a grasp. We just know that this type of thing happened in Deep Time.
Many whales live their long happy lives, or used to before Humans started hunting them to oblivion. When they die, many get consumed by sharks and seagulls. Some wash up on shores. Many sink into the deep water and are consumed by organisms that are more commonly found in methane seeps. Whale fossils are actually not that uncommon around here, especially at Majestic/Murdock Creek west of Port Angeles. If interested call and come by here and I have a rock with whale bones for you, as I have a pile of them in my driveway to give away. My roofer and good friend Isaias Ramirez is coming by next week for a minor roofing task and will be grabbing some for his flower garden at his new house, and for his 13 year-old son Isaias Jr. who is really into rocks and fossils and reads everything he can on these topics.
For now this farm with the amazing collection of fossil whales remains a closely guarded secret known to just a few. I am not one of the ones who know about it. It may be several decades before someone convinces the Feds to buy these farmers out, assuming they are willing to go, and turn this into a national monument rivaling Dinosaur in Colorado. It will be a popular one for sure, less than an hour off of I-5 and close to Portland’s airport. It won’t take that long to excavate perhaps but it will take infrastructure and a large team of in-situ preparers over several decades to expose even a small percentage of this site. It has been there for a long time and is not going anywhere fortunately. Most likely these whales are already species described from other localities. What bogs down “progress” are the nitty gritty discoveries of what else they find from stomach contents, babies born and unborn, scavengers (shark teeth are very common in fossil whale concretions). This may be frustratingly static to the casual tourist but to the paleontologists these tiny elements are all considered highly important discoveries worth pursuing.
There are other things such as diet and environmental conditions that can be sorted by careful isotopic analysis of tooth enamel layers. What happened to the animals after mortality is another entire branch of forensic science called Taphonomy that adds to the picture. At my Mist crinoid site one commonly fimds these little ringlets of crinoid arms by themselves, not attached to any animal bt in some cases, next to what was most likely the original animal. A friend of mine studied what happens to live crinoids by subjecting them to different quantities of volcanic ash. Some of these would respond by removing the arms which would walk off a few centimeters out of the way over a few days. During this time the tendons and muscles would differentially shrink pulling the arms into circle.
These arms would then circle in place for weeks! Death Dance of the Crinoids!!!
Enough about that. So strandings have happened since whales left the land. Explosions without several cases of dynamite are certainly possible if the conditions are right.
I suspect some eager predator wasn’t aware of the pressurized balloon he was about to bite into was THAT pressurized. Humans make the same mistake too, just by going up to a dead whale and touching it. See the last video below. Leave the dead whales to the experts and jus celebrate the holiday!
If you are done with your Thanksgiving meal including the three extra pieces of pumpkin pie that you really should have left on the table, you probably feel something like a stranded whale. These viseos show a possible method of immediate relief. Farting and moving one’s colon quickly are probably the best method. Hands off on my GoLytley though. I need this gallon of Polyethylene Glycol for my colonoscopy a week from today.
If all else fails, consult a Faroe Island Flencer in an orange suit or simply Go Flence Yourself. Enjoy these videos. This will help you digest your meal!
Happy Exploding Whale Day!!!