Scientists who recently piloted a submersible to a remote spot in the southeastern Indian Ocean have identified one of the largest and deepest whale graveyards containing hundreds of fossils, including one representing a previously unknown species.

Discovery in the Diamantina Fracture Zone

The graveyard, located in the Diamantina Fracture Zone, an area of marine ridges and trenches to the southwest of Australia, is approximately 746 miles long and holds over 10 million whale remains.

Researchers observed some sunken whale cadavers in the graveyard that were recent enough to still have scavengers attached to them; known as whale falls, these carcasses nourish diverse communities of deep-sea life, including bone-eating worms, snails, long-armed brittle stars and bivalves that survive through chemosynthesis — using chemical energy to produce their food.

The area serves as a habitat or migratory corridor for cetaceans, and the V-shaped topography of the Diamantina Zone may funnel carcasses to the seafloor, where very little sediment movement means that the carcasses stay exposed to scavengers.

The discovery was part of the Global Hadal Trench Exploration Program, an international collaboration to explore some of the least-known areas in the deepest parts of Earth’s oceans.

Original reporting: El Paso News (HLL/CB) — read the source article.