Some Things You Cannot Unsee

You’re clicking through a perfectly average afternoon on the internet—a cat video here, an error page there—and then something slides into your feed that resets the whole day. In 2013, a sperm whale washed up dead on a beach in the Faroe Islands. A biologist went to examine it. The animal had been decomposing for some time, building pressure internally, and when he made his first incision into the carcass, it simply exploded. Covered him. Covered everyone nearby.

The video made the rounds immediately. It has that quality of footage your brain keeps trying to reject even as your eyes confirm what happened. Sperm whales are enormous—thirty, forty feet of mass—and a decomposing one contains forces you genuinely do not want to be adjacent to when they release. The biologist survived, apparently unfazed, which almost makes the whole thing funnier.

I didn’t eat anything for the rest of the day. I watched it twice anyway. I don’t fully understand myself.