When a whale dies in the ocean, an ecosystem grows around its sunken carcass. It’s an epic burial at sea, something researchers call a whale fall. The body is a literal smorgasbord on which deep sea creatures and bacteria feast for years at a time before what’s left transforms into a reef festooned with anemones and sponges.
A whale that dies stranded on land is something different, a stinking mass of rotting flesh and draining fluids. While scavenging birds might struggle to bust through the corpse’s leathery skin, insects go to town. Little by little, they break the body down as its nutrients ooze into the sand and nearby vegetation.
It takes about two years for everything but the whale’s skeleton to disappear. But with the unholy stench of a dead, 45-foot-long sperm whale turning stomachs across town after beaching on November 9, 1970, officials in Florence, Oregon couldn’t wait that long. They needed the eight ton carcass gone as soon as possible.
The State Highway Division, which managed Oregon’s coastline in those days, treated the problem as if it were a giant boulder blocking a lane of traffic. They blew it up with dynamite, igniting “a blubber snowstorm,” as one observer described it. A geyser of blood and muscle shot a hundred feet into the air, falling on spectators stationed a quarter mile away. The reek reportedly lingered on their skin and in their hair for days.
The explosion
Ridding a beach of such a colossal problem with dynamite wouldn’t have seemed so unusual in the mid-20th century. There are many “wonderful new uses for dynamite,” a Popular Science article explained back in 1927—and not just on land, but at sea, where shark-leather operations used it to kill a dozen of the predators at once. The sad shark carcasses would bubble up to the surface for easy collection. Even whalers were, at the time, embedding small explosives in the tips of their “killing lances.”
The method did sort of work, says James Heiss, associate professor of environmental, Earth, and atmospheric sciences at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, just “not in the way anyone hoped.”
On a Monday, shifting tides pushed the bloated whale carcass into the mouth of the Siuslaw River and onto the sand dunes on the southwestern side of Florence, a small town on Oregon’s central coast.
By Thursday morning, as workmen spent nearly two hours excavating holes under the body to fit 20 50-pound cases of explosives, its fetid reek had become almost unbearable—though that hadn’t stopped a local opportunist from sawing off the whale’s lower jaw for a souvenir sometime over the preceding days.
Assistant district highway engineer George Thornton’s plan was to strategically place the explosives to blast the whale’s chunks into the river where they’d be gently carried back to the ocean by the tide. Instead, the dynamite’s enormous eruption flung the rotting beast every which way, a three-foot long piece caving in the roof of a car in the beach’s parking lot.
When the foul rain stopped falling, all that was left at the site of the explosion was a large hole and the whale’s severed tail. “It went exactly right,” Thornton told the press, apparently oblivious to the sheen of blood and bits now covering the beach and everyone on it.
The stench was reportedly only slightly less offensive than it had been in the first place. A bulldozer moved in to bury the largest hunks left by the dynamite. Seagulls, Thornton expected, would take care of most of whatever was left.
Ditching the dynamite
Today, “leaving a [beached] whale in place is the cheapest, easiest, and safest option,” says Heiss. “It also returns nutrients to the food web by serving as a food source for birds, crustaceans, and microbial decomposers.”
Remote beaches are fewer and farther between than they were 55 years ago. Meanwhile, an increase in whale strandings due to malnutrition, boat collisions, and entanglement in fishing gear sometimes makes it impossible just to leave the carcass be. In those cases, Heiss explains, the standard practice isn’t blowing it up but “bury[ing] it in the beach above the high tide line.”
There’s some controversy to the approach, including concerns over whether decomposing whales attract sharks and whether chemicals leaching from the body negatively impact water quality. While the answer to the shark question remains uncertain, the results of a study published by Heiss in 2020—a first step towards building a more comprehensive model—did show that buried whales leach chemicals that “are transported seaward in the beach by flowing groundwater and discharged to the ocean near the low tide line.” One compound he examined turned out to be 26 times higher in surf zones with a buried whale than without one—though the concentration could be decreased by interring the body closer to the water line where there’s “less opportunity for chemical reactions to occur.”
Still, on beaches near human communities, the choice between dynamiting a dead whale into a million stinking pieces or burying those stinking pieces intact, under the sand, is no contest. Florence, Oregon, at least, has a sense of humor about the incident. In 2019, they renamed the notorious stretch of sand Exploding Whale Memorial Park in the whale’s honor.
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