THE TRUTH ABOUT WHY WHALES MASS STRAND

(Monday, 07 December 2015) Mexican environmental authorities say they were able to lead seven beached dolphins back to sea but 16 others died. Twenty-one were pelagic rough-toothed dolphins and two were common dolphins ( link ). The mass beaching occurred at San Lazaro Beach on the Pacific coast along 1.2 kilometers (0.75 miles) of beach.  We do not know the exactly location of this beach because there is no such beach listed on the Internet or on Goggle maps. What we really need is the exact time of the beaching, local winds and tides, and the location of the beach. This is rarely provided by the media making our job difficult. If you know where this beach is, please send us the lat/long numbers so we can better plot the flow of the surface current. As the story goes, local fishermen and coastal watch activists "helped save 7 of the dolphins" despite strong wind and waves. Obviously the strong wind and waves were washing ashore, not washing back out to sea. An even...

To review the real cause of whale and dolphin beachings, read the column on the right. In general, this pod was injured by two quakes, one a few seconds after the first.  The events occurred along the Central Mid-Atlantic Ridge, upstream about 3,000 miles form the stranding beach. The pressure-related injury damaged their sinuses and knocked out their ability to echo-navigate and to dive and feed themselves. They were swimming north with the surface currents along the Florida Coast.There were two weather systems affecting the surface flow. The shoreward wind picked up and blew the surface waters and the whales into the sand. You can notice in this SST image that warmer Gulf Stream waters washed inward just north of West Palm Beach at 01:58 GMT early Saturday morning. This is when the non-navigating whales were brought in near shore. They moved north with this filament of warmer water and were then washed into the sand by an inflowing tide and a strong wind blowing shorewar...