Perhaps Australia will dynamite this dead beached whale

boing
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Originally published at: Perhaps Australia will dynamite this dead beached whale | Boing Boing

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Tangentially related… they could use it as a sauna, alternatively…

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Meanwhile in Iceland

I’ve heard reports of people bringing their kids to play on the carcass.

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Something something thought they smelled bad on the outside.

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Thar she blows!

tenor

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Flame throwers?

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Australians would probably put it on the “Barbie” with some shrimp…

What sort of knife would they fillet the whale with???

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You cut the fat off with a “flensing knife” I believe. Which looks a bit like a medieval weapon.

I wonder if there’s a reason why they don’t just haul these out to sea and punch some holes in them (so you can have whale carcass communities),

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I’d presume, that there is difficulty getting a boat that is powerful enough to drag the whale close enough to the beach to pull the whale at a reasonable cost.

Burying it is logistically simpler.

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Wikipedia seems to suggest that “whale falls” are mostly a deep sea thing rather than a coastal waters thing.

Whale falls are able to occur in the deep open ocean due to cold temperatures and high hydrostatic pressures. In the coastal ocean, a higher incidence of predators as well as warmer waters hasten the decomposition of whale carcasses.[1] Carcasses may also float due to decompositional gases, keeping the carcass at the surface.[6] The bodies of most great whales (which includes sperm whales and many species of baleen whale[7]) are slightly denser than the surrounding seawater, and only become positively buoyant when the lungs are filled with air.[8] When the lungs deflate, the whale carcasses can reach the seafloor quickly and relatively intact due to a lack of significant whale fall scavengers in the water column.[1] Once in the deep-sea, cold temperatures slow decomposition rates, and high hydrostatic pressures increase gas solubility, allowing whale falls to remain intact and sink to even greater depths.[6]

I guess if it was easy to get a body to sink just by punching a hole or two in it then the mafia never would have needed to invent cement shoes.

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Indeed. That’s not a knife, this is a knife, etc.

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