Exploding whale
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 scientist at Fisheries and Oceans Canada downplayed the danger of a whale bomb, though he suggested, nonetheless, that people might want to stop climbing on it. Don Bradshaw, a journalist in Newfoundland, tweeted a photo on Thursday showing that the whale had shrunken considerably. But, anticlimax: Trout River’s town clerk, though still sounding harried by this unwanted arrival on her shores, told CTV that the carcass had “deflated” a bit.
EXPLODING WHALE FULL
The pressure of the expanding gas might have continued to build, turning the former whale into an increasingly stressed balloon full of blubber and guts. For a while, the eighty-foot corpse had expanded to twice its living size, bloated with foul-smelling ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, and methane gases produced by bacteria on a feeding frenzy. Nor, despite our fervent desire for spectacle, is it likely to. In short order, it has become famous on the Internet as the “exploding whale”-though it has not, as yet, exploded. Last Friday, a blue-whale carcass washed up on the shores of Trout River, Newfoundland (population: six hundred).