The amount of carbon tied up in a typical single whale carcass (about two metric tons of carbon for a typical forty-ton carcass) is roughly equivalent to the amount of carbon exported to a hectare of abyssal ocean floor in 100–200 years. This amount of organic material reaching the seafloor at one time creates a pulse equivalent to about 2000 years of background carbon flux in the 50 square meters of sediment immediately beneath the whale fall. This helps to sustain the community structure that develops around a whale fall, but it also has potential implications for the biological pump, or the flux of organic material from the surface ocean to depth.