Rence is decidedly less happy and, with Xs in place of eyes, definitively dead. Gunderson is responsible for Flo and Rence, two whale costumes serving as something of unofficial mascots for the history of the exploding whale. Two years ago, Gunderson sold about 100 "I Love Florence" T-shirts displaying a keeled-over, exploding whale, then donated the proceeds for local art student scholarships. Though he remembers hearing about the incident when it happened, Barry's column cemented his enduring love for the exploding whale - and he's doing his part to spread that love. Gunderson is a native Oregonian and moved to Florence about 15 years ago. "I think it's so quirky that it should be celebrated." "It's the only thing that anyone knows about Florence, but everyone in the world knows about what we did," Gunderson said. So for future reference, if you find yourself standing next to a beached whale, stay away from the orifices! ( In all seriousness, hopefully this video and calculation has convinced you that you shouldn't go anywhere near a bloated beached whale, unless you are Joy Reidenberg.Gunderson has exactly the opposite philosophy. (The more you know!) This might be why the pressure that builds up as a whale explodes is much less than the pressure it takes to tear whale flesh - the gases find the easiest way out. (As the joke about physicists goes, assuming a spherical whale.) In reality, a whale has orifices, and so the gas will likely escape through the path of least resistance - which might be the mouth, the anus, or the genital track. I've assumed that the whale is essentially a big balloon, with rubber replaced by whale flesh and blubber. Based on this analysis, I'd conclude that the whale wouldn't have spontaneously exploded for a while, if the biologist hadn't poked it open!īut, as always, I'm making a simplifying assumption. That sounds like a lot, but as it turns out, this is way less than the maximum pressure imbalance that a whale's body can withstand. Plugging in numbers, I find that the pressure inside the bloated sperm whale was about 2.6 atmospheres, and the pressure imbalance on the whale's body (the pressure inside minus the pressure outside) is therefore 1.6 atmospheres. The pressure outside the whale is just 1 atmosphere.
The density of blood is 1025 kilograms/cubic meter, and the speed I know from above. This equation will give us the pressure imbalance that builds up on the whale's body, due to all the gas that is building up. It relates the pressure inside the whale (P_in) to the pressure outside the whale (P_out), the density of the blood (ρ), and the speed of the blood (v). What was the pressure inside this whale? To figure this out, we need to use an idea known as Bernoulli's principle.
In the video, the whale's innards spray sideways, so it doesn't reach nearly as high. Plugging in numbers, the maximum height of this blood fountain is about 16 meters (or ~50 feet). Simplifying this, we get an equation for the height of the blood fountain. In this equation, v is speed, g is the gravitational acceleration of 9.8 m/s^2, h is the maximum height, and m is the mass of a blood particle, which cancels out. So we can set these two quantities equal to each other, and solve for the maximum height that the blood can reach. When launched out of the whale, a drop of blood has a bunch of kinetic energy, and at the very top of its trajectory, all this kinetic energy is converted into its gravitational potential energy. If this fountain of blood was aimed straight up, how high would it reach? To work this out, we need to use the law of conservation of energy. Averaging these four values gives me an average speed of 17.7 meters/second (with a standard deviation of 3.4 meters/second).īoom! The blood shoots outs of the whale at a whopping 17.7 meters/second (or about 40 mph)! I tracked this explosion along 4 different paths. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
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