The graveyard is 23,000 feet below the surface of the southeastern Indian Ocean (Ai generated image)Imagine diving nearly 7 kilometres below the ocean’s surface and finding not one or two whale skeletons, but hundreds of them stretching across the seafloor.
That’s exactly what scientists discovered in the Indian Ocean — the world’s largest known whale graveyard.
The extraordinary find, published in the journal Nature, includes nearly 500 whale skeletons scattered along a 1,200-kilometre corridor on the ocean floor west of Australia.
Some of the fossils are estimated to be as old as 5.3 million years, making it the deepest and oldest whale graveyard ever discovered.
A discovery scientists never expectedThe whale graveyard was found during a series of deep-sea expeditions carried out by the Chinese submersible ‘Fendouzhe’ in 2023.
The graveyard is 23,000 feet below the surface of the southeastern Indian Ocean (Ai generated image)
Imagine diving nearly 7 kilometres below the ocean’s surface and finding not one or two whale skeletons, but hundreds of them stretching across the seafloor. That’s exactly what scientists discovered in the Indian Ocean — the world’s largest known whale graveyard.
The extraordinary find, published in the journal Nature, includes nearly 500 whale skeletons scattered along a 1,200-kilometre corridor on the ocean floor west of Australia. Some of the fossils are estimated to be as old as 5.3 million years, making it the deepest and oldest whale graveyard ever discovered.
A discovery scientists never expected
The whale graveyard was found during a series of deep-sea expeditions carried out by the Chinese submersible ‘Fendouzhe’ in 2023. Researchers conducted 32 dives into the Diamantina Fracture Zone, reaching depths of up to 7,000 metres. What they found left them stunned.
