THE TRUTH ABOUT WHY WHALES MASS STRAND

On page 36 of his book on sound imaging in the ocean, German underwater acoustic Professor Peter Willie, the former head of NATO's Undersea Research Center, displays three similar sonograms and compares the noise generated by undersea earthquakes and volcanic explosions with that of submarine nuclear explosions of several thousand tons of TNT-equivalent (ref #1).  Professor Willie says earthquake sounds are the loudest underwater sounds ever produced. He also cautions that we should be aware of the underwater rumbling of   "about 7,000 outstanding, dramatic geodynamic earthquake events per year worldwide, each of a thousand tons of TNT-equivalent and more."   He ought to know because it's his job to determine the acoustic differences between underwater nuclear explosions and natural catastrophic events such as earthquakes. Professor Willie also expresses a belief that evolution has somehow intervened to protect whales fro...

notice all the seaweed washed ashore by the current -- the current also washed the lost whales to the same beach by Capt. David Williams read the real reason all whales mass strand I'm a retired sea captain with 50 years of ocean-going experience. I struggled during all those years to understand why pods of whales beached themselves. The only thing that made sense was that they had lost their acoustic sense of direction and swam down current in the path of least drag. This was a no-brainer for me because everything lost at sea floats or swims downstream ─ all sea captains know this. If someone falls off your vessel at night, you always look down current -- never up current. To make it even more of a no-brainer, every sea captain knows that the flow of the current washes sand ashore to build beaches so it just made a lot of sense to me that lost whales would end up on sandy beaches. To boot, the beach was where people hung out. If there are no beaches, there are no ...

dead Orca on the rocks read the real reason all whales mass strand Sadly, this killer whale had been struggling for some time in the surrounding waters before she was finally found washed ashore. After one successful rescue attempt to return it to the water on December 22nd, the poor orca was found washed up on Lookout Rocks, Western Cape (South Africa) on December 24th, 2015. As you can see below, the surf can get pretty rough at Lookout Rocks. To swim around in that heavy surf in a weaken state, a killer whale needs to have a good functioning biosonar system if it expects to avoid being washed into the rocks. In fact, with all the air bubbles and sand kicked up by the heavy surf, a healthy killer whale would never have swam within 500 meters of this shoreline. Killer whales don’t go where their acoustic sense of direction does not work. They simply turn around and go where their biosonar functions just fine. That it ended up stranded on the rocks, is proof that it ha...