The deep ocean remains the great unexplored archive of our planet, and each descent into the abyssal zone has the potential to reveal something unusual that we were not aware of before. This is what has happened to the expedition of the Fendouzhe submersible which has been found in the Diamond Zone, southeast of the Indian Ocean, a large cemetery.
What they have seen. After 32 dives to suffocating depths of between 4,616 and 7,001 meters, researchers have mapped an unfathomable megasite with a 1,200-kilometer-long strip strewn with fossils and skeletons. It is, by far, the largest cetacean necropolis ever documented.
This discovery has been captured in an article published in Nature where the discovery is described as a “whale necropolis”. However, we are not talking about a single mass burial as a result of a catastrophic event, but rather about a historical sinkhole where the corpses of dying whales have been accumulating for millions of years.
The identification. The team identified 476 fossil cetaceans and five active biological communities from recent carcasses in a minimal sampling area. Extrapolating from these figures, scientists at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) estimate that there could be about 750 fossils per square kilometer.
In the words of an expert like Stephen Godfrey, according to statements collected by LiveScience: “It’s as if each of these whale falls were a new little restaurant opening along a 1,200-kilometer shopping center.”.
A trip through time. The importance of the discovery lies not only in the astonishing quantity of the remains of these whales, but also in their age. Using strontium isotope dating, researchers have been able confirm that some of these fossils are at least 5.3 million years old, dating to the Early Pliocene.
Among the recovered bones, which are mainly upper jaws, five species of beaked whales and one species of baleen whale have been identified. But the paleobiological star of the discovery is a extinct speciesnamed as Pterocetus diamantina.
Life in death. At 7,000 meters deep there is much more life than we think, but in the form of bacteria. The problem is that the energy that comes from the surface is not in the form of light, but literally whale carcasses that fall under their own weight and feed a large ecosystem.
We know that specialized bacteria thrive in the dark by breaking down the oils inside bones and releasing hydrogen sulfide. This chemical energy serves as the basis for a food web that attracts insane densities of organisms that number up to 2,840. individuals per square meter. These include, for example, bone-eating worms or bivalve mollusks.
Its importance. According to published notes, the importance of the Diamond Zone is twofold. On the one hand, it vividly documents how a concentrated resource such as a giant corpse can sustain diversity under overwhelming pressures. On the other hand, preserving fossils from the late Miocene and Pliocene provides a large “library” of how whales adapted, grew, and colonized the oceans.
Images | Jonathan Hsu
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