Im viewing all these posts about exploding whale carcasses and reading comments which express amazement and incredulity. Forgive me, folks, but I find it all just a bit amusing. We humans do everything possible to isolate ourselves from and insulate ourselves against contact with death. Whenever we are forced to confront it (as when there is a ten-ton corpse lying on the beach), we are gobsmacked like five-year old on a first zoo outing. There are plenty of human corpses which explode spontaneously. We dont see them because humans encase their dead in vaults and bury them underground. But it happens routinely and it very well might happen someday to any or most of us. Of course, the mess will be confined and hidden, so no living humans will ever know. But this is the usual course of reclamation dictated by the physical laws of the Universe as they are expressed in this biosphere. The bacteria and fungi which break down our soft tissues make our constituent molecules once again available for recycling through the web of life. These microorganisms breathe and poop just like we do. Gases build up in the confined spaces of our inner body cavities and, voila!, it all ends with a big explosion. There is nothing particularly gruesome about the whale carcasses. They might offer some hazard to any creatures unfortunate enough to be in the way of shrapnel from the explosion, and it is perhaps just a damned pity that a creature as majestic as a leviathan should meet an undignified end in a niche of the biosphere where he is a stranger. But there is an inherent beauty in the process itself.
Posted on: Mon, 05 May 2014 10:13:04 +0000
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