PILOT WHALES STRANDED ON SAND BAR

AT GOLDEN BAY, NEW ZEALAND

INJURED BY SEAQUAKE

 

On November 14, 2011, sixty-five pilot whales stranded on a sand bar at the tip of Farewell Spit in Golden Bay, South Island, New Zealand.

http://www.timeslive.co.za/scitech/2011/11/15/34-stranded-new-zealand-whales-die

The SEAQUAKE SOLUTION says that this particular pod was injured by powerful, low frequency, acoustic (compressional) waves induced into the water by vertical jerking in the rocky bottom during shallow quaking in the earth's crust. These seismic pressure waves exceeded the pressure regulatory mechanisms of the whales, resulting in barotraumatic injury in each animals massive head sinuses, disabling their biosonar and preventing them from diving and feeding themselves. 

With dysfunctional biosonar, the whales are unable to determine the direction of any returning echonavigation clicks. With no familiar landmarks, the pod quickly becomes lost at sea.

When lost at sea, the travel path of any animal, dead or alive, is totally controlled by the surface currents. Thus, a seaquake-injured pod will always swim with the flow of the surface currents until they recover from their injuries, are culled by sharks, die and sink to the bottom, or are washing into a sandy shore by the surface currents.

The best way to look for look for a suspicious seaquake following a whale stranding is to trace upstream from the stranding beach. Searching various seismic data banks for earthquakes prior to mass strandings over the last 20 years reveals an obvious pattern:  Mass strandings usually occur about 25 days after an undersea earthquake has occurred about 2,300 miles upstream from the stranding beach. These suspicious earthquakes have the following general characteristics:  (1) magnitude range between 4.7 and 6.5, (2) average magnitude 5.3, (3) always occurs along a mid-oceanic ridge system, (4) always occurs in a known feeding grounds for the species in question, (5) always occurs less than 15 km deep in the crust (measured from the ocean's surface), (6) tends to occur along the rift valley as opposed to transform faults, (7) tends to display vertical thrusting verses side-to-side motion, (8) tends to occur between sunset and sunrise local time, and (9) tends to occur near volcanic hot spots and hydrothermal vent fields.   

In this particular stranding, the surface currents feeding across Farewell Spit and into Golden Bay flow as illustrated in the chart below:

   

Searching the earthquake data bank reveals on one possible earthquake 1,207 kilometers SW of Hobart, Tasmania. The event has the following characteristics:


Magnitude    mb 5.1
Region    WEST OF MACQUARIE ISLAND
Date time    2011-10-20 16:07:24.0 UTC (local time 01:07:24 near epicenter)
Location    52.64 S ; 140.27 E
Depth     15 km (fixed)
Distances    1207 km SW Hobart (pop 204,857 ; local time 03:07:24.3 2011-10-21)
1193 km SW Kingston-blackmans bay (pop 14,371 ; local time 03:07:24.3 2011-10-21)

http://www.emsc-csem.org/Earthquake/earthquake.php?id=239592

The depth is this event is fixed by computer and more likely is lass that 10 km.

As to the motion in the seafloor, this event was indeed a thrusting events evidenced in the quick MT solution found on this map page.