Video: What is a Whale Fall? Here's a whale graveyard found in SoCal

The E/V Nautilus team left their cameras on while they were exploring a relatively young submarine landslide in the Santa Cruz Basin off of Southern California and what they found was incredible, incredibly huge.

It's called a Whale Fall. That's when a whale dies and sinks to the seafloor, the carcass of the cetacean introduces an extra food source into the ecosystem that can support communities of life for years after the whale has perished.

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When a whale dies and sinks to the seafloor, the carcass of the cetacean introduces an extra food source into the ecosystem that can support communities of life for years after the whale has perished. When a whale dies and sinks to the seafloor, the carcass of the cetacean introduces an extra food source into the ecosystem that can support communities of life for years after the whale has perished. Image 1 of / 44 Caption Close Video: What is a Whale Fall? Here's a whale graveyard found in SoCal 1 / 44 Back to Gallery

Even though Whale Falls are often rare to come across in the deep sea, the Nautilus team explored a natural whale fall last year and the well-documented Rosebud Whale Fall off the coast of San Diego.

2016 WHALE FALL: Whale graveyard teeming with life deep below surface of Pacific Ocean

The 2017 Nautilus Expedition will be the most extensive to date. From May to November, Nautilus will document and survey unexplored regions from British Columbia, Canada, along the West Coast of the United States, to Baja California, Mexico.

You can watch the expedition live from the ocean 24-7 on www.nautiluslive.org through Nov. 20.