Overview
- The Nature paper published Wednesday, June 10, 2026, describes 485 whale‑fall sites mapped along a roughly 1,200 km stretch of the Diamantina Fracture Zone, including 476 fossil sites and five active falls.
- Researchers made the discoveries using China's crewed submersible Fendouzhe during 32 dives in 2023 and recovered 43 dated specimens that range from about 120,000 years to roughly 5.26–5.3 million years old.
- Most preserved remains are dense beaked‑whale skulls whose hyper‑ossified bones, ferromanganese mineral coatings, and very slow sedimentation rates explain their long‑term survival on the hadal seafloor.
- The active whale falls host rich chemosynthetic and scavenger communities — microbial mats, Osedax bone‑eating worms, bivalves, brittle stars and other invertebrates — many of which may be undescribed by science.
- Authors formally named one extinct species, Pterocetus diamantinae, and offered density‑based extrapolations that suggest millions more carcasses and millions of tonnes of sequestered carbon, but they stress those totals are model estimates that need further study and more sampling.