In the early hours of one day in 2004, a truck carrying a male sperm whale was quietly driving in Yunlin County, Taiwan, and in order to avoid people's attention, the car deliberately chose to be transported late at night, but during the transportation, due to the bumpy road and the semi-corrupt sperm whale remains accumulated so much gas inside, that when transported to the vicinity of Xiaobei Night Market on Ximen Road in downtown Tainan, a whale explosion occurred.
After the whale outbreak, the semi-rotten intestines and internal organs of the whale were sprayed on the surrounding shops, vehicles and surrounding buildings under the action of pressure, and the stench was temporarily overflowing, and although the municipal government urgently sent a cleaning team to continuously disinfect and clean up, the odor remained in the local area for several months.
In addition to China, there was also a sperm whale explosion in Florence, Oregon, USA. In 1970, a sperm whale weighing about 8 tons ran aground in Florence and died, we know that the remains of the sperm whale are very large, the fat and skin thickness are also very thick, so that after the sperm whale dies, the microorganisms in the intestine begin to decompose the sperm whale's internal organs and other remains, microorganisms in the process of decomposition will produce a lot of carbon dioxide, when the whale body gas capacity is enough, the pressure in their body will become very high, under the action of internal and external pressure, the whale's remains will swell up, It looks like a small leather ball.
The whale is very dangerous at this time because it can self-detonate at any time. At that time, after the American people found that the sperm whale had run aground and died, the Oregon Highway Authority had jurisdiction over the coast, and they needed to clean up the sperm whale remains.
When cleaning up, the best solution is to artificially cut several openings in the whale so that the gas inside the whale is released, so that whale explosions will not occur. However, if the whale accumulates too much gas in its body and artificially cuts an opening in the whale, it is equivalent to puncturing the balloon with a needle, which may cause it to explode.
In this case, an engineer named George Thornton of the highway department stepped forward and proposed to use artificial detonation to blow up the whale's remains. The shattered whale remains will become small pieces that will become food for seabirds and other scavengers, allowing their company to defuse the threat of whale explosions at minimal cost.
Regarding this crazy plan, we can only say: "The imagination is very full, the reality is very bone".
In this way, a team that is very professional in blasting but not professional in whale blasting is formed, and after studying the remains of the whale, they calculate the amount of explosives needed to blow up the whale, and then everything is ready, only to detonate.
After detonation, as people thought, the whale remains were detonated. But the reality is very humiliating, only the whale's internal organs are detonated, and the main torso of the whale is still lying there.
Moreover, whale remains are difficult to blow up, even if some of the whale parts are blown into pieces, but the fragments are so large that they smash the surrounding cars; on the other hand, the fragments originally envisioned to be able to become scavengers' food, but the fragments after the explosion are still too large for the scavengers, so that people still have to clean up the whale remains.
The difference is that the beach after the explosion became very smelly, and the whale meat hit the surrounding cars during the explosion, and the company will face compensation, coupled with the whale remains fragments everywhere, making it more difficult to clean up.
In nature, whale remains rarely explode. Under normal circumstances, after the whale dies, it will float on the surface of the sea because of too much body fat, and some scavenger sharks will come to the whale to bite the fat and muscles on the whale. While they bite the whale's remains, they also reduce the internal and external pressure difference inside the whale's body, so that whale explosions do not occur.
As the scavengers eat, the fat on the whales decreases, at which point the density of their remains is greater than the density of the ocean, at which point their remains settle slowly, and in the process of settling, opportunists will come to feed on the whale remains.
In this way, whale remains settle as the grease continues to decrease until it settles to the bottom of the sea, which is how whale falles are formed.
Whale fall is an important part of the marine ecology, whale fall can not only provide a large amount of food for marine benthic organisms, but also can provide them with shelter and shelter, to help benthic creatures avoid predators.
It is precisely because of this that whale fall is one of the "three major life oases on the seabed", but with the continuous reduction of the number of whales, the number of whale falls available for formation is also limited, once the number of whale falls is reduced to a critical value, many benthic organisms in the ocean that live on whale fall will also face extinction.