The world's largest and deepest whale graveyard has been found in the Indian Ocean.

An international research team led by Chinese scientists has discovered the world's largest and deepest whale graveyard on the seabed of the southeastern Indian Ocean, at a depth of approximately 7,000 meters below the surface. It is believed that the whale remains scattered across this seabed, extending for about 1,200 kilometers, have accumulated over a period of approximately 5.3 million years, dating back to the early Pliocene epoch.

This unique study was conducted jointly by researchers from the Institute of Deep-sea Science and Engineering of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the University of Pisa in Italy, and the Institute of Earth Sciences in New Zealand, and its results were published in Nature magazine on June 10th. In early 2023, researchers launched these observations by conducting 32 dives in the Diamantina Zone using the manned submersible 'Fendouzhe' from the ship 'Tansuo 1'. They succeeded in recording five active whale carcasses and 476 sites with fossilized whale remains.

The phenomenon that occurs when a whale dies and sinks to the seabed is known as a 'whale fall', creating a rich ecosystem that provides food and shelter for deep-sea organisms for decades. Previously, the deepest such observation was recorded at a depth of 4,204 meters in the Southwest Atlantic Ocean, but with this new discovery of whale remains at a depth of 6,789 meters, that record has been surpassed by more than 2,500 meters.

Among the 43 fossil specimens identified were five species of beaked whales and one species of baleen whale. Researchers observed approximately 759.5 whale remains per square kilometer and estimated that more than 10 million carcasses of marine mammals, including whales, could exist in this entire region. Furthermore, it has been calculated that these whale remains store approximately 6.7 million metric tons of carbon, which is equivalent to the average amount of organic matter deposited on the seabed in that region over 4,700 years.