It was a dirty job, but Bjarni Mikkelsen, a marine biologist at the National Museum of the Faroe Islands, had to do it.
After two whales died this week near the Faroe Islands, the government wanted to use one of the skeletons in the National Museum. So Mikkelsen began the first step of cutting the animal’s gut open. But little did he expect that it would explode in his face.
“The animal was more than two days old when we took it so we knew there would be some pressure on the inside, but nothing like what happened,” he told the Daily Mail.
The footage of the whale exploding — which was posted online on Tuesday and already has hundreds of thousands of views — has now been seen across the world.
The gut-busting reaction came after a buildup of gases, specifically methane, caused by the putrefaction process.
While these types of “natural” whale explosions aren’t common, they aren’t unprecedented.
In 2004, a sperm whale exploded due to .
Of course, every exploding whale isn’t always natural.
In the 1970s in Oregon, workers blew up a dead whale to clear it off the beach. The event, captured in a classically bizarre news report, sent chunks of whale everywhere shocking and dismaying the reporter and destroying several cars parked as far as a kilometre away.
The Faroe Islands are about 300 kilometres north of Scotland, but are under the sovereignty of the Danish.
