Overview
- During a February 2023 survey with the submersible Fendouzhe and about 32 follow‑up dives, researchers mapped a roughly 1,200 km corridor of whale remains in the Diamantina Fracture Zone at depths of about 4,200 to 7,000 metres.
- The team recorded roughly 476 fossil remains, identified five active whale‑fall sites, and used strontium‑isotope dating plus osteological and genomic evidence to link some specimens to living beaked whales and a southern minke, with the oldest dated to about 5.3 million years ago.
- Scientists documented dense, specialized communities living on fresh carcasses and fossils, reporting 35 known macrofaunal taxa at active falls and visible local animal densities as high as 2,840 individuals per square metre, including bone‑eating Osedax worms and chemosynthetic fauna.
- The authors propose several factors to explain the concentration and preservation of remains — a V‑shaped trench that funnels carcasses, dominance of deep‑diving beaked whales, low sediment burial, high bone density, and iron‑manganese mineral coatings — and note these causal links remain hypotheses that need wider testing.
- The team offered rough extrapolations that the trench could contain millions to over ten million carcasses, but those numbers are provisional because the mapped area was only about 0.64 km² and broader surveys are needed to confirm scale and assess implications for whale evolution and deep‑sea carbon cycles.