World's Largest and Deepest Whale Graveyard Discovered in Indian Ocean Fracture Zone

Chinese scientists using the Fendouzhe submersible discovered the world's largest known whale graveyard in the Diamantina Fracture Zone of the Indian Ocean west of Australia. The site contains nearly 500 skeletons spread along a 1,200-kilometer corridor at depths reaching 7,000 meters. 3 million years.

Researchers catalogued 485 fossils, most from different species of beaked whales, and identified one new extinct whale species among the remains. The Fendouzhe completed 32 dives in 2023, carrying up to three people and using robotic arms to collect samples. Lead author Xiaotong Peng of the Chinese Academy of Sciences said the team was "astonished" when the scale became clear.

"But 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," Xiaotong Peng said. " Animals observed living on the carcasses include jellyfish, brittle stars, bone-boring worms, bivalves, worms, snails, and crustaceans. Many of these species are believed to be new to science.

7 million tonnes of sequestered carbon. The authors state that the results support the hypothesis that deep-sea whale falls act as evolutionary hotspots and biogeographic stepping stones for sulfide-dependent fauna. Fossils recovered during earlier trawling suggest similar hidden archives may exist off South Africa, the Iberian peninsula, and the Crozet islands.

Paleontologist Stephen Godfrey compared it to the 1977 identification of hydrothermal vents teeming with life. Xikun Song, a biologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Deep-sea Science and Engineering, noted that a whale's size and bone chemistry enable these communities, while the deep ocean's conditions make such sites difficult to locate.