The world’s largest whale graveyard has been discovered at the bottom of the Indian Ocean by Chinese scientists, who found that the vast expanse of both new and ancient carcasses supports huge communities of deep-sea life.It is the deepest and oldest known whale graveyard on Earth, according to research published in the journal Nature on Wednesday, with some fossils dating back 5.3 million years.From inside a small submersible, the Chinese researchers saw many strange animals — many believed to be new to science — living off the whale carcasses.AdvertisementAdvertisementA new, though extinct, species of whale was also identified among the nearly 500 skeletons that were found up to 7,000 meters deep along a 1,200-kilometer corridor of bones in the Indian Ocean west of Australia.Lead study author Xiaotong Peng of the Chinese Academy of Sciences told AFP that the researchers were “astonished” when the scale of their discovery became clear.It was known that when whales die and drop to the seafloor, their sunken bodies — called “whale falls” — provide a source of food to deep-sea creatures.”But discovering a necropolis of this scale was completely unexpected: the size of distribution, the depth and the age range were far beyond anything we had imagined,” Xiaotong Peng said.This undated image provided by Peng Zhou shows a Chinese submersible recovering fossilized whale bones from the deep seafloor, southeastern Indian Ocean, in the Diamantina Fracture Zone. / Credit: Global TREnD, IDSSE via APThe whales were believed to have died in such numbers in this particular area because it is a popular foraging habitat — and has a V-shaped trench that funnels carcasses to the seafloor.AdvertisementAdvertisement”Truly incredible experience”For the discovery, the Fendouzhe submersible carried out 32 …
