A video showing the exploding guts of a dead sperm whale in the Faeroe Islands is the latest viral video to hit the web.

The video, which is graphic in content, shows the whale's guts blowing sideways like an erupting volcano, nearly injuring a scientist and a fisherman who were both standing nearby.

According to Food World News, scientist Bjarni Mikkelsen was cutting the whale open to remove its skeleton for a Danish museum when his knife hit a gas pocket in the whale's blubber, which caused gases, liquids and internal organs to all explode out of the hole.

Biologist Adam Ruben told The Huffington Post that the whale's gas build-up happens after fish in the animal's stomach decompose.

"The animal was more than two days old when we took it so we knew there would be some pressure on the inside, but nothing like what happened," Mikkelsen said. "We couldn't imagine it would happen like that so it was a little bit more of a surprise. It wasn't a shock. We had expected something. In the situation I was more worried about something worse happening of anyone getting hurt."

After the explosion, the process of stripping the whale's flesh from the skeleton had resumed.

The whale had died of natural causes a few days before it was brought in. The sperm whale is on the Red List of Threatened Species of the IUCN, and is also traditionally bigger than a school bus.

As of press time, the video had received over two million views.

Tags: offbeat