Blue whale skeleton still leaking oil 26 years after its death

If you visit the New Bedford Whaling Museum in southeastern Massachusetts, be careful beneath the 66-foot-long blue whale skeleton. That’s because these blue whale bones are still leaking oil, even though the whale has been dead for over two decades.

This rare blue whale skeleton, dubbed the “King of the Blue Ocean” – or KOBO for short – has been on display at the museum since 2000. It’s still leaking because the blue whale’s bone marrow is full of oil and much oilier than human bone.

[Related: Dozens of rare, endangered whales spotted off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard.]

“The marrow is oily and the oil is a source of energy for these animals. Especially the baleen whales, which usually have a time of year when they don’t eat,” says Robert Rocha, associate curator of science and research at the New Bedford Whaling Museum Popular Science. “There is energy stored in the muscles and blubber, but the energy stored in the oil and bones is a reserve energy source for them.”

Normally, this oil is extracted from whale skeletons through natural processes as it is buried on the seafloor and picked apart by barnacles and other animals. However, KOBO was found on the bow of a ship. Despite being the largest animals on the planet, blue whales are still no match for huge tankers and accidental ship attacks.

“KOBO was probably about five years old and estimated to have weighed about 80,000 pounds,” Rocha says. “He was accidentally killed by a 486-foot freighter traveling from Belgium to Providence, Rhode Island in 1998.”

The carcass was eventually towed ashore and dismembered by scientists for research purposes. The recovery team didn’t really spend time removing the oil from the bones by exposing them to the sun and treating them.

In 2010, the museum installed a special oil catcher to see how much oil could be captured. The catcher is located near the whale’s rostrum – near its beak, snout and vertebrae. Oil drips into the bottle every day and the museum has 1,000 milliliters in storage in a jar and another 200 milliliters in the collection containers.

“We missed a good ten years of oil drops,” says Rocha. “And it was definitely a lot wetter and dirtier in the first 10 years.”

Local radio host Chris Arsenault of FUN107 told CBS affiliate WPRI that he dropped some oil on himself while visiting a museum a decade ago. However, he has no hard feelings towards KOBO and says the contract was “pretty lucky”.

“I felt something wet on the back of my neck, and there was a brownish hue that eventually turned to the back of my white-collar shirt,” Arsenault recalls. “I had to get rid of it.”

The oil from such skeletons was not used to light the world’s lamps during the heyday of whaling in the 19th century. It wasn’t until land-based whaling facilities and factory ships appeared that whalers and eventually World War I soldiers were able to use the oil stored in the bones.

“The British [government] “We were able to control the market for whale oil during World War I,” says Rocha. “They rubbed it on their feet to prevent trench feet, and some of the pilots reportedly applied it to their faces to protect themselves from wind and sun.”

[Related: We finally know how baleen whales make noise.]

It was also used in explosives, as one of the byproducts of whale oil soap is glycerin. When the glycerin is mixed with nitric and sulfuric acids, explosive nitroglycerin is formed. This nitroglycerin was then used as fuel for bullets and rockets in World War I and World War II.

“But the funny thing about the chemistry is that it has to be baleen whale oil,” says Rocha. “Tooth whale oils contain waxy esters that cannot be used for glycerin and nitroglycerin. But because of these waxy esters, their oil was used as a lubricant.”