In Death, New Life: The Science And Symbolism of a Whale Fall

In 2025, an unusually high number of whales have washed up dead along the shores of the greater San Francisco Bay Area region—nine gray whales in just the past two weeks. The images are haunting: massive, graceful creatures decomposing on the sand. But Omnia Saed’s short yet poignant Atmos essay, accompanied by stunning photographs by Lena C. Emery, offers a kind of solace. Saed reframes the death of a whale not as an end, but as a beginning—and a boon to the deep sea. When a dead whale sinks to the ocean floor, its body becomes food and organic matter for years and decades to come. Saed also weaves in the Afrofuturist mythology of Drexciya, an underwater civilization born of the descendants of pregnant African women thrown overboard from slave ships. Their children, born in the sea, now live and thrive underwater. This narrative “offers a speculative retelling that transforms tragedy into resilience,” and Saed beautifully connects the myth to the ecological reality of whale falls. “In its simplest form,” Saed writes, “a whale’s death becomes a source of life for years beyond its time.”

When a whale sinks to the seabed, it sets off an extraordinary chain of events. A single whale fall can blanket an area of 50 square meters, roughly 538 square feet, on the ocean floor, explained Dr. Craig Smith, a professor at the University of Hawaii and a leading expert on whale falls. In that single moment, it delivers a bounty of food equivalent to what small particles would provide over 200 to 2,000 years.

This haunting question reframed my understanding of land and sea as intertwined repositories of history. The ocean, like the soil, bears witness to lives lost and transformed. It warranted asking: What happens to our bodies, to their essence, when they are claimed by the ocean? How do we reconcile the ocean as both a site of loss and a source of life?