While searching for information, you can sometimes come across answers to questions you have never previously thought of.

This weekend I unearthed just such a page, when I accidentally came across the story of the exploding whale.

The 37th anniversary of the incident happened to be Monday.

The premise of the story was "how do you dispose of 1,000 pounds of dead sperm whale washed up on a beach?"

This was the situation facing the staff of the Oregon Parks Service in the United States, who had to deal with the carcass of a dead sperm whale that had died after being beached.

The problem for the authorities was whale carcasses don't break down very quickly and it was too heavy to be washed away by the tide.

It was decided the best way to dispose of the carcass was to help nature take its course by breaking it up into smaller chunks that could then be scavenged more easily.

The local highway engineer was brought in to provide expertise on blowing up the whale.

He packed it with dynamite, set in such a way as to blow most of the remains out into the ocean where it could be eaten by fish and seagulls.

Any remains left on the beach after a few days was then to be cleared by bulldozers and disposed of.

This sounded like a sensible plan and quite cost-effective compared with the alternative solutions such as cutting the carcass by hand, burial in the sand dunes or towing it out to sea.

Hundreds of people turned out to watch the spectacle, luckily all at a very safe distance.

For when the explosives were detonated the explosion threw sand and whale blubber more than 30 metres into the air.

The spectators ran for cover as the explosion didn't go quite as planned and blubber showered over a large area, even caving in the roof of a parked car some 400 metres away.

Suffice it to say that following this incident, this is a disposal method that is never used and beached whales are now commonly buried or towed out to sea and sunk.

For many years the story of the Oregon exploding whale was thought to be an urban myth, but the internet has now given this story a new lease of life with the original film footage and newspaper cuttings describing the incident widely available.

I also came across other exploding whale stories, with another widely reported incident that happened in Taiwan, where a decomposing whale being taken to a museum exploded due to the rotting gases in its stomach, causing quite a mess in the street.

If you want to take a look at the Oregon explosion, the original footage is available to download at www.theexplodingwhale.com/evidence/the-video