Scientists discover 'concerning' secret in unknown depths of 410ft Great Blue Hole
Scientists have discovered a ‘concerning’ secret in the unknown depths of a 410 foot Great Blue Hole.
The mysterious sinkhole is located just off the coast of Belize where experts have managed to extract a sample of material from the bottom.
And now the sediment core they retrieved is revealing secrets from the past six millennia.
Using a drilling platform, a team of researchers from Goethe University in Frankfurt were able to remove 98 feet of sediment core from the cave back in 2022.
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And analyzing the data, they found some crucial information about weather patterns that pass through the region.
The experts found that between four to 16 tropical storms pass over the hole every 100 years.
Each storm that passes through leaves behind different grain sizes, color and composition in the hundreds of layers of coarse particles in the sediment core, which scientists are able to tell apart from one another.
However, concerns were raised when they discovered that these storms have been increasing in frequency and intensity over the years, and have risen significantly in the last 20 years alone.
Scientists believe that while this is partly due to natural shifts in the climate, the recent spike is down to climate change caused by humanity.
The cave has been around for the last 150,000 years but wasn’t submerged in water until the end of the last Ice Age, around 15,000 years ago.
If these current trends continue, scientists predict that there will be upwards of 45 tropical storms that will hit that region before the end of the century.
This is far greater than the average has been for the last six millennia.
Publishing their findings in the Science Advances journal, the research team said: “Predictions of tropical cyclone frequencies are hampered by insufficient knowledge of their natural variability in the past.
“A 30m-long sediment core from the Great Blue Hole, a marine sinkhole offshore Belize, provides the longest available, continuous, and annually resolved tropical cyclone frequency record.
“A 21st-century extrapolation suggests an unprecedented increase in tropical cyclone frequency, attributable to the Industrial Age warming.”
The Great Blue Hole is a popular tourist destination for scuba diving, with many making day trips from coastal towns in Belize.
This is after the site was made famous back in the 1970s by oceanographer and co-inventor of the first successful open-circuit self-contained underwater breathing apparatus (SCUBA), Jacques Cousteau.
In 2012, the Discovery Channel named the Great Blue Hole as first place on its list of the top 10 most amazing places on Earth.