Nick Pyenson

Your chances of seeing a whale in the ocean is not equal everywhere.

Whales seem to prefer certain corridors.

Yeah.

And that's a result of decades and decades of work of tracking whales, where they go to feed, where they go to eat, to mate, all through the course of...

maybe a migration cycle.

And you kind of expect to find the remains of those superhighways on the seafloor underneath.

So there should be places around the world that you expect to find the remains of whales.

And I think this is probably one of them.

The other thing that's really spectacular about this finding is just the extent.

I mean, we're talking about an area that

in one linear distance might measure the same distance from New York to Chicago.

So imagine driving from New York to Chicago and there are just whale bones littered all across the highway.

That's a bit mind-bending, I think.

Yeah.

So they found two different categories of whale sites.

They found the remains of fossil whales, and then they also found a whale fall that is kind of like a whole ecosystem that colonizes on the carcass of the remains from a living whale.

And from that group, they found baleen whales and a lot of other beaked whales.

Most of the fossil sites seem to just be beaked whales.

I think that the experience the researchers must have had was just coming across whale skeleton after whale skeleton as they cruised in their submersible along the seafloor.

And that's why the researchers said, you know, this is a megacite.