Thirty five family units of sperm whales frequent the area around Dominica. Unit Z is a family group of sperm whales composed of closely related females and their offspring, forming a matrilineal social structure.

“There is no end

To what a living world

Will demand of you.”

—Octavia E. Butler

When a whale dies, its massive body sinks. This colossal creature—an enormous, graceful mammoth of the sea—tumbles, sways, and ultimately free-falls to the ocean floor. The whale’s descent, spanning the vast gulf between the surface and the abyss, is a kind of miracle, bridging two worlds: the illuminated surface and the shadowy underworld.

There is so much we don’t know about the deep ocean, but what we do know is astonishing. The ocean’s deepest point extends approximately 36,000 feet below the surface. Beyond 600 feet, light no longer penetrates, making photosynthesis impossible, yet 98% of marine life resides on or near the sea floor. Life at these depths depends almost entirely on “marine snow”—organic matter drifting down from the ocean’s upper layers.

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.

It’s an enormous input of organic matter that sticks around for centuries. “We found bones in the middle of the Pacific from whales that have been extinct for over 100,000 years,” Smith said.

In its simplest form, a whale’s death becomes a source of life for years beyond its time. It is a transformation that turns death into life on an almost incomprehensible scale. Beyond its biological importance, the concept of a whale fall also holds a poetic significance. It reflects themes of loss and renewal, reminding us that even in its most tragic forms, what’s happened in the past can sustain life in the present in ways we are only beginning to understand.

These poetic resonances began to crystallize for me while working on a story about Black maritime archaeologists excavating slave ships, a project I had spent the better part of a year exploring. The ocean, in that context, became more than a physical space; it was a graveyard—a repository of history, memory, and unspoken stories.

To deepen my understanding, I turned to Katherine McKittrick, professor and Canada Research Chair in Black Studies at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and the author of Dear Science and Demonic Grounds. Her scholarship challenges conventional geographic thought and left me awestruck by the symbolic resonance of the ocean as a site of memory. One line from Dear Science, in which McKittrick describes a student asking and answering her own question, continues to echo in my mind:

“She asks: What happens when our blood falls to the soil and seeps in? She wonders: What happens to our conception of land when it absorbs Black people’s erythrocytes, leukocytes, and thrombocytes? She answers: Strange Fruit.”

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?

These ideas brought me to Ellen Gallagher, a contemporary American artist whose series Accidental Records explores oceanic phenomena, including the concept of whale falls. Her work pushes us to reconsider the biological cycle and its poetic implications, linking the deep sea to histories often left unspoken. Gallagher’s engagement with the Afrofuturist legend of Drexciya—a submerged Black civilization descended from enslaved women cast overboard during the Middle Passage—further underscores the ocean as a space of both mourning and possibility.

Drexciya, a mythos created by the Detroit techno duo of the same name in their 1992 album Deep Sea Dweller and expanded over the course of a decade, is an underwater civilization that emerges from the depths of the Atlantic Ocean. According to the myth, the Drexciyans are descendants of pregnant African women who were thrown overboard from slave ships—deemed sick or rebellious by their captors. These women’s unborn children, the Drexciyans, were said to have been born underwater, adapting to life in the ocean, where they built a thriving, subaqueous empire.

The Drexciya mythos resonates deeply, reframing some of history’s darkest moments by exploring themes of loss, survival, and the emergence of life from unimaginable depths. It offers a speculative retelling that transforms tragedy into resilience, crafting a powerful narrative rooted in Afrofuturism. This vision has inspired reinterpretations and imaginings by artists around the world, including British filmmaker John Akomfrah, visual artist Ayana V. Jackson, and Gallagher, whose works continue to expand and recontextualize Drexciya’s legacy.

In “Whale Falls” and “Aquajujidsu,” two works from Gallagher’s series, fragments resembling a whale carcass—made of cut-out layers of distorted black paper—rest on canvases engulfed in shades of blue: cerulean, aquamarine, sapphire. The contorted fragments and dismembered remains evoke a haunting vision of the seafloor, revealing an underworld that serves as both a site of profound beauty and terror, a graveyard and a source of  life in the depths of the ocean.

“Gallagher’s work on Drexciya, where Black people become plants, corals, faces—where their essence becomes part of the underwater ecosystem—is so profound,” McKittrick explained. “It’s a believable story to me, one that imagines Black life thriving underwater without anthropomorphizing it into a humanoid figure. That move—to resist turning us back into rulers of some Black Atlantis—is stunning. It’s a radical rethinking of the ocean.”

Whale falls, much like the myths of Drexciya or the work of Black maritime archaeologists, challenge us to see history as more than static loss. These phenomena reveal how death and memory can transform into something life-sustaining. The ocean, in all its vastness, becomes a site where the past reverberates, nourishes, and insists on being remembered. It’s a radical reimagining—not just of the ocean, but of history itself.

This transformation is mirrored in the decomposition of a whale’s body, a process that unfolds in three distinct stages. Each stage fosters unique marine communities, turning the ocean floor into a bustling hub of life.

The first is the mobile scavenger stage, which can last a few months or a few years. During this phase, large scavengers—like sleeper sharks and deep-sea fish like hagfish and rat-tails—and smaller invertebrates descend upon the whale, consuming its soft tissues at astonishing rates. The carcass becomes a temporary feast, drawing predators from across the deep sea.

Next comes the enrichment opportunist stage, which can also last for months or years. As the remaining tissue decomposes, the surrounding sediments and exposed bones become enriched with organic matter. Opportunistic species—such as polychaetes and crustaceans—colonize the area, forming dense communities that can reach up to 4,183 individuals per square foot. This stage marks a transition as the nutrients from the whale seep into the surrounding environment, fueling new life.

The final phase, the sulfophilic stage, can persist for decades. During this time, anaerobic bacteria break down the lipids in the whale’s bones, releasing hydrogen sulfide—a key resource for sulfur-oxidizing bacteria. These bacteria, in turn, support a complex ecosystem of chemoautotrophic organisms. This stage boasts extraordinary biodiversity, with an average of 185 macrofaunal species (including a variety of crustaceans, mollusks, and even bone-eating worms) thriving on a single whale skeleton, surpassing the diversity of any other deep-sea hard substrate community.

A whale fall is more than just the end of one life—it is the beginning of countless others. Each stage transforms the carcass into a foundation for vibrant ecosystems, offering sustenance in the ocean’s darkest, most inhospitable depths.

But even this ancient flow of life from death faces disruption from the most existential threat of our age: climate change. While whaling has largely been regulated, a new and significant threat looms: the expansion of oxygen minimum zones—regions in the ocean where oxygen levels are critically low, often nearing zero. As ocean temperatures rise, warmer waters lose their ability to absorb and retain oxygen. Rising temperatures also increase stratification, causing the ocean to separate into distinct layers that mix poorly. This limits the flow of oxygen-rich surface water to deeper layers, resulting in depleted oxygen levels in those regions.

“The expansion of oxygen minimum zones, driven by climate change, is likely to fundamentally alter the diversity of deep-sea whale fall ecosystems,” Smith warned. “Most of [the seafloor] is likely to be underlain by this oxygen minimum zone in the next few decades. In very low oxygen waters, whale fall ecosystems look quite different. Most of the whale fall-[dependent] species can’t survive below an oxygen level of about 1.36 ml per gallon. If large areas of the seafloor beneath humpback and gray whale migratory routes become low-oxygen zones, the whales that die and sink there won’t support whale fall ecosystems.”

This shift could result in a significant loss of biodiversity in whale fall ecosystems, particularly along the northeast margins of the Pacific, including coastal and offshore areas from Alaska into California,where these oxygen minimum zones are expanding rapidly. Smith notes that similar expansions are occurring globally, including off the coast of South America, where disruptions to marine ecosystems and food chains are already underway. This poses a significant threat to migratory whales like blue and humpback whales, which depend on abundant prey such as krill and small fish—species that may decline or shift to new areas as oxygen levels drop, forcing the whales to adapt their migration patterns or struggle to find enough food. 

In truth, our responsibility extends beyond simply appreciating the poetics of the natural world and its processes—we must also protect them. Whether reflected in the myth of Drexciya or Ellen Gallagher’s “Whale Falls,” the lesson is not just to marvel at the beauty of the natural world. Rather, it is to acknowledge the ocean’s vastness as a source of life that calls for our care and stewardship.

“There is no end to what a living world will demand of you,” Octavia Butler once wrote. The whale’s final descent becomes a poignant testament to this relentless cycle of life—a story of renewal echoing through the ocean’s depths, where nothing is wasted, where the large feeds the small and the small feeds the large in a potentially endless loop, and everything is repurposed to sustain the next chapter. 

Photography Assistant Chris Leigh-Cattrall

This story first appeared in Atmos Volume 11: Micro/Macro with the headline, “After the Fall.”

This story was made possible with the support of Future Being.

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