The grim task of clearing hundreds of washed-up whale carcasses was under way in New Zealand Tuesday, with the beach closed over fears the bodies will fill with gas and explode as they decompose. The sands at Farewell Spit where the nearly 700 pilot whales ...

Whales carry quite a bit of bacteria and parasites. They’re a pretty big ecosystem on their own when they’re swimming in the ocean, so there’s a lot of stuff on whales that you probably don’t want to get in your lungs or in your skin. Alright, so what exactly causes them to explode?

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. on November 9, 1970, officials in Florence, Oregon, decided a 45-foot-long stinky sperm whale needed to go. A whale that dies stranded on land is something different, a stinking mass of ...

The word “meme” didn’t exist when Paul Linnman and Doug Brazil—a KATU-TV reporter and cameraman, respectively—chartered a flight from Portland to Florence one cool November day in 1970, and the notion that ideas or images could propagate like ...

Fifty-five years ago, a dead sperm whale washed ashore near Florence — and what happened next became one of the most infamous moments in state history. Engineers from the Oregon Highway Division, unsure how to dispose of the 8-ton carcass, decided to ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Happy botched whale corpse disposal day to you and yours. Just last year, Florence Mayor Rob Ward stood in front of a small crowd at Exploding Whale Memorial Park to announce that the ...

In 1970, a 45-foot, 8-ton sperm whale washed ashore near Florence, Oregon. The Oregon State Highway Division decided to dispose of the carcass using dynamite. Florence will celebrate the 55th anniversary of the event with various activities on Nov.16.