This is why meteor airbursts have never been linked to whale strandings. The silent slow killer. It is ironic seeing how fast they come into the atmosphere.
2008, May 30-31. Madagascar. Loza Lagoon system of Northwest Madagascar. A mass stranding of around 100 Melon-Headed whales (Peponocephala Electra). Of the original whales that entered the lagoon system, seventy-five died from causes related to being out of their normal deep-sea habitat.
The International Whaling Agency (IWC) and other federal agencies with the permission of the Madagascar Government launched an investigation into the cause of this mass stranding. The IWC concluded that the most plausible trigger for the event was a high-power 12 kHz multi-beam echosounder system (MBES) that had been firing along a shelf break a day before the event.
The whales were in terrible condition. They were in a state of almost complete starvation. It takes a long time for a whale to end up in this condition. With empty stomachs and skin over skeletons without blubber, they were the swimming dead. Some were found 65 km inland. This event did not happen overnight, it took months for these events to unfold. These deep-sea predators turned into shallow-water scavengers to survive, unfortunately, it wasn't enough. Nature's cruel death.
2007, January 17. Indian Ocean, North of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. Large Airburst. Coordinates: (-8.7, 50.8). Time: 09:50. e = 54.8, -e = 1.4, or equivalent blast of 1,400,000 kg/TNT. Altitude: 33.3 km. This detonation was twice as low and had 7x the energy of the May 16 Portugal airburst. Any cetacean within a 50km radius of this event would have been handed a death sentence, and that's a conservative estimation.
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