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Showing posts with the label mass stranding

seaquake causes pilot whales to strand in Nova Scotia

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Judique, St. George's Bay, Nova Scotia :  On 4 August 2015, 16 pilot whales from a larger pod of about 35 stranded. Eight died. Linden MacIntyre, a former journalist who lives about a kilometre from the site in Judique, said he believes the whales originally beached at McKay's Point, Inverness County, as the tide washed out from under them  sometime early Tuesday morning . ( link ) The clue ( as the tide washed out from under them ) indicates that the whales guided by the incoming tide to the edge of high water mark and lingered there until the tide dropped from under them. They were then considered stranded. This is exactly what should be expected from an entire pod that had lost its acoustic sense of direction. The same appears true in the picture below. You can see the high tide mark near the grass. These whales were guided slowing to the shore as the tide was rising until they could swim no closer. Then, as the tide dropped and the water flow from under them, they we

Seaquake Causes 2 Pods to Beach at King Island

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ALMOST 100 whales and dolphins died in two mass strandings near King Island.   On Friday morning locals found 13 dolphins beached at Quarantine Bay on the island's north-west coast, while on nearby New Year Island a stranding of about 67 pilot whales and 20 dolphins went undiscovered until yesterday. http://www.themercury.com.au/article/2012/11/04/365299_most-popular-stories.html On 18 October, 15 days prior to the beaching, a magnitude 5.9 earthquake occurred in the seabed 1298km south of Hobart Tasmania at 54.32 S ; 143.99 E.  The quake was very shallow at 10km below the ocean's surface. www.emsc-csem.org/Earthquake/earthquake.php?id=289074  The epicenter of the quake was situated at the bottom and to the left of the center of the above chart.  The seabed danced about when the quake hit.  This dancing acted like a powerful piston pushing and pulling against the water column, generating waves of intense pressure changes that swept over the the pod of p