05/09/2017
Línea Verde
info@lineaverdemunicipal.com
A new study says these geomagnetic disruptions may have confused the whales' ability to navigate, diverting them into the shallow waters.
Trapped and lost, the whales died on European beaches, attempting to escape.
The research has been published recently in the International Journal of Astrobiology.
Researchers have been puzzled by the losses as autopsies showed that the animals were mainly well fed, young and disease-free.
The 29 strandings generated a great deal of public interest and a large number of theories among scientists.
These ranged from poisoning, to climatic changes driving prey into the North Sea which the large cetaceans followed to their doom.
Sperm whales live in deep, warm-to-temperate waters all around the world. Many groups live around the Azores in the eastern Atlantic.
When they are between 10 and 15 years old, young males head north towards the polar region, attracted by the huge quantities of squid found in the colder waters.
Their journey sometimes takes them up along the west coasts of the UK and Ireland and into the Norwegian sea. They normally return by the same route.
But in less than a month in early 2016, 29 sperm whales were found stranded on the coasts of Germany, the Netherlands, the UK and France.
Now a team of researchers say they think they understand what happened to them.
The argue that sperm whales navigate using the Earth's geomagnetic field.
Rather than being uniform, the field is stronger in some places and weaker in others, and scientists believe that species learn to read these anomalies and use them for navigation in the way that humans read contours on maps.
Dr Klaus Vanselow from the University of Kiel, Germany, and his colleagues say that large-scale solar storms may have distorted the magnetic field and caused the whales to lose their way.
Triggered by coronal mass ejections from the Sun, these storms contain large amounts of charged particles and radiation.
When they hit the Earth's upper atmosphere, they produce the spectacular displays of the polar lights over the Arctic, however the most powerful storms can also damage communications systems and satellites.
Scientists already have some evidence that solar storm activity can impact the navigating abilities of birds and bees.
Dr Vanselow and his colleagues studied the connection between whale strandings and two major solar storms that took place at the very end of December in 2015.
These produced huge displays of the Aurora Borealis that were seen in many parts of Scotland and elsewhere.
Looking specifically at the region around Shetland, the scientists found that these solar events would have caused short-term shifts in the magnetic field of up to 460km, in the area between the islands and Norway.
This could have caused sperm whales in the region to move in the wrong direction.
They also believe that sperm whales see a regular magnetic anomaly off the Norwegian coast as a "geomagnetic mountain chain", a kind of guardrail that prevents them from entering the North Sea.
The solar storms may have nullified this effect, rendering the mountain chain invisible and allowing the whales to swim through into the North Sea.
BBC News. Science & Environment
Cerrar [X]Uso de cookies
Utilizamos cookies propias y de terceros para mejorar nuestros servicios y recopilar datos estadísticos sobre hábitos de navegación. El uso de cookies es necesario para la notificación de incidencias. Si continúa navegando, consideramos que acepta su uso. Puede obtener más información, o bien conocer cómo cambiar la configuración, en nuestra Política de cookies