Whale Watching

Those waiting for #explodingwhale to pop will be disappointed. It’s running out of gas. View Sunday (left) and today. pic.twitter.com/ytI8GfHxW0

— Don Bradshaw (@DonBradshawNTV) May 2, 2014

Last week, Svati Kirsten Narula covered the internet’s infatuation with a dead whale:

A dead blue whale washed up on the shore of a small fishing town in Newfoundland last week. A bloated, beached, blubbery bomb of a blue whale. As of 3:30 pm Eastern Time [April 30th], the carcass is still intact, but onlookers are worried that it might soon explode. Literally.

The concerned marine science communicators at Upwell and Southern Fried Science have created a website devoted to monitoring this situation:

HasTheWhaleExplodedYet.com. I kid you not.

Ian Crouch reviews the history of exploding whales:

The idea of spontaneous combustion is certainly compelling, but the truth of the matter is that history’s famous exploding whales had a little help from humans.

A whale blew up last year in the Faroe Islands, but only after a seam had been cut by a researcher, who just managed to dodge the gooey shrapnel. Another whale, which showered the streets of the Tawainese city of Tainan in a mess of innards in 2004, was being transported on the back of a truck when it burst. And the most famous exploding whale in history went sky-high thanks to some inventive, if ill-considered, meddling. In 1970, members of the Oregon Highway Division rigged up a dead beached whale with dynamite in an attempt to obliterate it. But it turned out that they were low on firepower, and so, rather than blasting the body into tiny bits of seagull food, they instead sprayed huge chunks of whale over a crowd of people across a wide radius. Thankfully, there was a television crew on hand to capture the full arc of the scene—from hopeful preparation to grim postmortem. Onlookers fled the dunes. An Oldsmobile was flattened. Nobody died.