Talk:Whale fall

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Metric System
This article uses feet to describe the depth of the fall. Should it be converted to meters? 2000ft = 609m, 6600ft = 2011km. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 90.145.124.27 (talk) 14:15, 17 August 2016 (UTC)

Copyvio?
http://psychcentral.com/psypsych/Whale_fall

This article seems to have been copied directly from the above address, but I am not sure what action should be taken. So I'll have to leave it in someone else's capable hands.
 * This article was not copied from the psychcentral.com site - I wrote the original version myself. Psychcentral.com appears to be one of many sites mirroring Wikipedia content. - Jpo 01:02, 25 October 2005 (UTC)
 * My mistake
 * This seems to happen a lot and confuses/angers many people. I'm not sure if the following text was recently posted, but psychcentral does have the following verbage on their site: "This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Whale fall". Via Personal Open Wikipedia (beta) open source software by J Grohol and Psych Central. (If you would like to edit this document, click on the Wikipedia article link above.)" Phauge 23:01, 19 April 2006 (UTC)

Picture
Someone please tag as "needs picture". —Preceding unsigned comment added by 18.202.0.41 (talk) 02:15, 18 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Done. Adrian J. Hunter(talk•contribs) 03:24, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

Sinking?
Why would a blubbery animal such as a whale fall at all when it dies? You'd expect the carcass to float. Difluoroethene (talk) 15:30, 23 August 2011 (UTC)
 * All species of large whale sink when they die, some more than others. Even bowhead and right whales occasionally sank after they were killed by whalers (one of the ways many were lost). Blue, fin, and sei typically sank, as did humpback and gray. Sperm were said to sink the least often (at least during the open-boat era). During the modern era they had to pump the whales full of air to keep them afloat. SaberToothedWhale (talk) 02:44, 6 January 2012 (UTC)

Dead link
reference 2 "http://www.columbia.edu/~rwb2103/whale/whalefallintro.html Whale fall intro." is broken. Slibville (talk) 20:33, 28 September 2014 (UTC)
 * ✅, thanks. Adrian J. Hunter(talk•contribs) 10:20, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

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Lateral advection
What is "lateral advection" that is described in the Contribution to the biological pump section? I think it would be helpful to either provide a link here or to provide a short definition. I also think that there needs to be an extra comma in that sentence so that it reads: "Lateral advection of carbon, especially in coastal areas, contributes to this deficit in the model, but food falls are also another source of organic carbon for the deep ocean". Mnjenkins22 (talk) 13:57, 27 January 2020 (UTC)
 * I know nothing about all this, but following the "be bold" wikipedia guideline, I added a link to the advection page (which I discovered when doing it :-) ). As for the "lateral", I can only guess it means stuff moves around the same depth, not from bottom to surface or the reverse. But I fully agree, the whole paragraph is very technical. Jrob kiwi (talk) 15:12, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

How fast do they fall?
How long does it take for a carcass to reach the sea floor? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2600:1702:1DE0:8FB0:C4BD:22C8:872C:946A (talk) 02:36, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

I just played around to see if that one is easily answered... :-) Here's a possible answer, not sure how much it holds.

We're looking for an approximation, or order of magnitude. I found a formula here: https://www.quora.com/How-fast-does-an-object-drop-in-water I applied it to the following:


 * mass = 30,000 kg (result of a simple web search for weight of whales, here a sperm whale)
 * g = 10 (simpler than 9,8)
 * area facing the fall = surface of the belly of a whale = 30m long, 5m wide, so 150 m2
 * C = 1, because I have no idea what it is but it seems like a good order of magnitude, see drag coefficient

The result is a speed of 2m/s. If we consider a depth of 2000m, that's 1000s fall, so around 20mn (an hour is 3,600s).

So final answer is: 20mn, with a very high imprecision :-) It seems quite short, but after all 2km is a big depth, but not much of a distance... it's a bit like walking, really.

I have zero expertise here, so it's probably false because of water density changes along the way. (oh and apologies if this really doesn't belong in the discussion page of wikipedia) Jrob kiwi (talk) 15:44, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

Shipwrecks ...
Given the large number of ships which have sunk to the deep ocean over the years, some of which would have hundreds or even thousands of humans on board (as well as other animals such as cattle and horses), ghoulish as it may seem, has anyone tried looking at these ? The Yeti (talk) 15:18, 20 March 2021 (UTC)
 * a quick web search yielded this, which seems to confirm your assumption: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41396-021-00978-y (a scientific article from April 2021, so maybe it was written in response to your posting :-D ) Jrob kiwi (talk) 15:05, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

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