Coming up!
Jonathan ventures into Florida caves in the name of science—learning how the aquifer
works!
Welcome to Jonathan Bird’s Blue World!
For many divers, cave diving is a passion.
It might seem crazy to want to explore a submerged, underground world, where running out of air
means almost certain death.
But exploring underwater caves is incredibly exciting.
And it has opened our eyes to the way that aquifers function.
Life on Earth depends on water.
While most of the planet’s water exists in the oceans, evaporation separates some
water from the salt.
When it rains, most of that precious fresh water seeps into the ground.
Some is soaked up by the roots of plants.
But some enters the aquifer, a layer of semi-permeable rock or gravel that holds the water like a
sponge.
In places where the topography goes downhill, the water in the aquifer often flows slowly
downhill with it.
In Florida, the rock beneath the soil is limestone, a soft rock made by coral reef animals millions
of years ago when it was a sea floor.
Rain falling through the sky picks up carbon dioxide, which creates a very mild acid called
carbonic acid.
Over thousands of years, this mild acid eats away at soft limestone, eventually hollowing
out caves.
This turned the aquifer in Florida into underground rivers!
Sometimes the river comes close to the surface of the ground, and the ceiling gets thinner
until it falls in.
In Mexico they call it a cenote.
But in Florida, it’s called a sinkhole.
This gives divers a way in to the caves.
Sometimes the underground rive finds a place to spring out.
Florida is full of springs where this crystal clear water emerges from the aquifer into
daylight.
The Blue World team is heading to one such place today.
A lot of people don’t realize how important the cave systems are down here.
They contain the fresh water that is the drinking water for everybody in Florida.
They’re the planet’s plumbing, and people don’t realize how extensive they are, how
far they go.
They go under the forest, they go under parking lots, they go under your house…they’re
very extensive systems.
So today we want to demonstrate that.
We have brought with us a transmitters to take underwater.
Todd and I are going to take this transmitter and we’re going to swim through the cave
system.
And the two Zachs are going to be up above following us with the receiver, and they’re
going to see just how far we go.
We have come to Wes Skiles Peacock Springs State Park in Florida, home to one of the
most popular cave dives in the world.
The Peacock springs system spans more than 6 miles of surveyed underwater passages.
Todd and I are ready for a long day of exploration.
And cave diving always starts out with lugging the gear.
Man these are heavy.
Somebody needs to lay off the pizza!
I’m pretty sure he is going to get an Academy Award someday.
Alright, good to go!
Now the fun can begin.
The transmitter is sealed up inside a homemade PVC housing.
Hey Todd did you turn on the transmitter?
Turned it on, I have it clipped off right here on my side.
Alright cool!
Are we ready?
Let’s go!
We sink down into the cavern zone.
I’m filming and Todd is responsible for the transmitter and handling our reels.
Hey everybody!
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of notifications from us, so just hit the button!
Are you getting a signal?
Yeah, looks like I got it!
Alright!
Alright let’s see where they go!
Oh, I lost it.
There it is, there it is.
As we head away from the light of the entrance, we pass the stop sign, which warns people
without cave training of the danger.
Thirty feet above us, the Zachs are following our journey with the receiver.
Think they have this much underbrush down there?
Probably not!
Probably a smooth trip for them!
Every so often Todd stops to hold the transmitter close to the rock for a good signal.
We have no idea if the Zachs are with us or not, so we try to make it easy for them.
The signal is really strong right here.
Wow!
They’ve got to be really close to the surface.
Yeah!
Then we push on, deeper into the cave.
Getting weaker, got keep going!
Ooh, the
signal is getting really strong now!
Must be really close!
We reach a section of the cave that angles down much deeper.
We know this will make our signal weaker, so we can only hope that The Zachs stay on
the same heading until they pick us up again.
It’s getting weak.
Getting weaker.
Looks like they’re going this way.
Down here, the bottom is silty so we have to be cautious.
I can only wonder where the Zachs are now and what is above us.
Still got ‘em.
Where are they?
I don’t know!
Todd tries the ceiling trick again, hoping it will work through 60 feet of rock.
I’m keeping an eye on the floor of the cave for one of my favorite cave critters.
And then I find one: a cave crayfish, completely without pigment or eyesight.
As we continue, the Zachs are crossing a tree farm!
And the cave has gone weirdly circular!
Soon the cave angles shallower and we have hope that the transmitter is getting through.
It turns out we are right underneath the local supermarket.
We can’t talk, but fortunately Todd and I are good at diver sign language.
Which one are they in?
I’m noticing that in this section, the water is a little murky.
It turns out we’re right under a cow pasture.
And this is no coincidence.
That way!
Eventually we turn and head back to the cave entrance.
Woo!
Wow!
What a dive!
That was great!
I think we got pretty far Yeah we went really far, I can’t wait to
see what those guys came up with up here.
Our journey has taken us all over town, beneath roads, beneath a parking lot and most of all
beneath farmland.
While farming is obviously extremely important to our food supply, there can be serious side
effects from farming or ranching above the aquifer.
A cow for example generates ten times the waste of a human.
So 100 cows in a field generates as much as 1000 people.
And all that waste just sitting in a field gets washed into the ground when it rains.
Pesticides and fertilizer on crops do the same thing.
All this contamination ends up seeping down into the aquifer.
And guess what else is in the aquifer?
Everyone’s drinking water supply.
We are contaminating our own wells.
And when the water comes out of the spring into sunlight, the nutrients in the water
like nitrates and phosphates from manure and fertilizer fuels the growth of algae and bacteria,
which further contaminates the water and sometimes even chokes off the oxygen, which kills the
fish.
Legendary cave explorer and filmmaker Wes Skiles was one of the first people to sound
the alarm.
He used his extensive knowledge of the aquifer—gained by years of diving into these caves—to help
government agencies understand what was happening and pass legislation to reduce pollution in
the aquifer, so we all could have safe drinking water.
So yes, cave divers can be pretty useful sometimes!
Scuba divers are the most passionate and vocal defenders of the ocean because we are the
ones down there seeing what is going on.
We can’t help but want to protect the places we love.
Cave divers are a rare breed, but they are the only people who who actually see what
is in these caves, and have come to appreciate the importance of the aquifer, and the life
that depends on it.
And so cave divers have become powerful advocates for the health of these incredible environments—the
underground heart of the Blue World.
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