A whale that dies stranded on land is something different, a stinking mass of rotting flesh and draining fluids. They blew it up with dynamite, igniting “a blubber snowstorm,” as one observer described it. The explosionRidding a beach of such a colossal problem with dynamite wouldn’t have seemed so unusual in the mid-20th century. In 1970, officials exploded a 45-foot-long sperm whale carcass that had washed up along the Oregon Coast in the Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area. In 2019, they renamed the notorious stretch of sand Exploding Whale Memorial Park in the whale’s honor.