Deep-sea whale graveyard is a treasure trove of fossilized bones

Hello Nature readers,
Today we marvel at the working lives of scientists, discover a whale ‘graveyard’ in an ocean chasm and track the global migration of millions of people over the past two decades.

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Scientists at work, in pictures

This in-flight photo, taken by student Gunnar Hartmann, is the overall winner of Nature’s #ScientistAtWork photo competition. In 2024, Hartmann joined a 50-day research expedition to support the annual migration of the northern bald ibis (Geronticus eremita) from southeast Germany to southwest Spain. These birds were hand-raised, and so are more than happy to follow their foster parents, who guide them in an aircraft.

See more of the winning entries, selected by Nature’s careers team.

JUNO finds clues to neutrino-mass mystery

Researchers working on the Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) experiment in Guangdong, China, have captured crucial details of how mysterious neutrino particles can switch between different types in flight. Neutrinos are so light that they were once thought to have no mass, and the standard model of particle physics doesn’t seem to explain why they do. Physicists use experiments such as JUNO to study how neutrinos ‘oscillate’, or change from one type to another, which is the first step in answering that question.

Iceberg rocks create new seafloor habitats

Rocks falling from melting icebergs are providing new homes for corals, sponges and other animals on the Arctic sea floor. Researchers found that glaciers in Greenland and Russia swept up the rocks and carried them to the coast. There, the glaciers spit out icebergs that drifted south, melted and dropped their load of rocks. These ‘dropstones’ sank to provide deepwater oases of biodiversity. “Climate change impacts our world in ways we never even thought of,” says marine biologist and study co-author Kirstin Meyer-Kaiser.

Tool raises red flags on suspect journals

An online tool that tracks publishing patterns in academic journals could warn researchers about potentially problematic journals before they submit their work to them. The platform, called Journal Trends, allows users to get a breakdown of a journal’s published papers by country and year, which can raise any red flags such as a sudden surge in publications. These indicators alone don’t prove a journal is untrustworthy, but might indicate that researchers should investigate a journal further, says the tool’s developer, research-integrity sleuth Achal Agrawal.

Use AI to curb publication rates

“The best outcome of AI in science would be to let us publish less, not more,” argues theoretical physicist Gianfranco Bertone. AI tools can make resources such as codes and datasets accessible without the need for a paper to communicate their worth. They can also automate lab tasks so that scientists have more time to pursue more difficult research questions. “To publish less would not mean doing less science. It would mean recognizing more scientific contributions in their own right, rather than only after they have been converted into article form,” Bertone writes.

Language loss is an environmental issue

An estimated one-third of the world’s approximately 7,000 Indigenous languages could be extinct by the end of this century.
“If we lose language, we lose knowledge, and then there is a problem for environmental conservation,” says Alfred Kik, one of the researchers racing to document the ecological knowledge of Indigenous leaders in Papua New Guinea. Cataloguing and preserving these languages and conserving endangered ecosystems can go hand-in-hand, say experts. “But first we must first embrace the idea that the extinction of languages and cultures is an environmental issue,” writes conservation biologist Karen Masters.

Video: whale necropolis under the sea

Researchers have discovered a ‘whale graveyard’ at the bottom of a 7,000-metre-deep ocean chasm. Using the submersible vehicle Fendouzhe, the team recovered 476 fossilized bones belonging to a range of beaked whale species — one of which was dated to more than 5 million years ago. Why these bones collected in the canyon is unclear, but it’s by no means a thing of the past. The team also found the carcasses of recently-deceased whales, which are finding new life as food for a host of deep-sea creatures — many of which are thought to be unknown to science.