The cause of the death of marine mammals turned out to be extraterrestrial
If in the sky flashes of aurora borealis flash, expect trouble: somewhere on the shore whales will be thrown. These two phenomena, which seemingly have nothing to do with each other, were linked by German scientists from the University of Kiel, Germany. They were looking for the cause of the mass death of sperm whales in the North Sea. In early 2016, 29 animals were thrown onto the beaches of Germany, France, Great Britain and the Netherlands in just a few days. An autopsy showed that they were all young, healthy and even full.
What drove the whales to death? This remained a mystery. And the tragedies themselves only added to the number of similar ones occurring in many other regions of the world's oceans.
And here's the key - the northern lights. Of course, it is not they who bring to death, but they accompany them on their last journey.
Places of mass death of sperm whales. Red arrows - their way from the Norwegian Sea.
As scientists explain, the northern lights color the sky after solar flares. It is their visible effect. But there are also invisible ones - solar flares shake the magnetic field of our planet, and also distort it - shift the magnetic lines of force. Shifts can reach 460 kilometers. It is they who confuse the whales, which are guided in the terrain by the magnetic field. The whales are swimming in the wrong direction.
Specifically, those sperm whales that died on the coast of the North Sea returned from the Norwegian Sea, where they fished squid. Heading to habitats in the Azores region. They had to circumnavigate Great Britain from the west, leaving the Scottish coast on the right side, and the whales, bewildered, turned early and got into shallow water. There, in the end, they disappeared, buried in the coast.
Red arrow - this is how the sperm whales that died in early 2016 swam. White arrow - this is how they had to swim to return home - to the Azores.
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The solar flare, which led sperm whales to fatal mistakes in early 2016 and drove them into shallow water, occurred, scientists believe, at the very end of 2015.
“Sperm whales, which are caught in the open ocean by geomagnetic disturbances, sooner or later realize that they were wrong,” explains research leader Klaus Vanselow. - They will sail the wrong way for several days and correct the route. Once in the North Sea, they find themselves in a trap within 1-2 days, from which they do not know how to get out.
It was not possible to save the trapped sperm whales.
By the way, scientists from NASA are now conducting similar studies. Long-term data on solar flares are compared with statistics of whale deaths around the world. That is, the very hypothesis that geomagnetic disturbances affect the behavior of animals is not considered crazy.
But it is too early to say that it is the only true one.
VLADIMIR LAGOVSKY