While these beautiful celestial bodies are wonderful to behold, other objects that can inflict existential dread also exist. The team recently explored a nearby blue hole, around 350 feet deep, known as “Amberjack.” They were surprised to discover two dead smalltooth sawfish, an endangered species, at the bottom.The universe is filled with large planets and incredibly massive stars. But every time we go down there we find something new.” “The excitement comes from the idea that this is exploration - we don’t know what we will see down there biologically and chemically,” she said. Together the lander, which is shaped like a triangular prism, and divers will collect water and sediment samples and complete a biological survey, Dr. ![]() In next month’s mission, which NOAA is funding, the plan is to carefully lower a 600-pound lander inside. One reason that so little is known about them, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is that their entry points are often narrow - before they broaden out - making it impossible for an automated submersible to enter. The water inside is also often atypically clear, which is part of why they are beloved by divers. Pools of fish, oodles of sponges and an array of plants are common within these “oases,” as Dr. There seems to be something about the unusual seawater chemistry in blue holes that is particularly good at facilitating life. And then after diving for quite some time, “This hole opens up, and it’s booming with life.” “You’re in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico and you don’t see anything all around,” Dr. Bowen owns, posited that there were so many sink holes on the floor of that Gulf of Mexico that if it were possible to drain it, “it would probably look like Swiss cheese.” An article in Advanced Diver Magazine, which Mr. Bowen became one of the first people to dive to the bottom and to map the blue hole. Borden told a diver friend, Curt Bowen, about the Green Banana, and in 1993, Mr. Borden, wondered how deep they were.Įventually, Mr. Spear fishermen who gathered near the holes centuries later, including Mr. Borden said he had heard, because in the 1530s, when the Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto was hanging out in the area, there was fresh water streaming out of the holes. ![]() According to Larry Borden, a longtime commercial fisherman and boat captain who has known about the Green Banana for decades, the name emerged in the mid 1970s after a boat captain saw a green banana skin floating by a known “spring,” as fishermen referred to the underwater sink holes back then. Petersburg, agree that the name, the Green Banana, sounds like it should be a bar in Key West. ![]() The scientists leading the mission to the sink hole, which begins 155 feet below the ocean’s surface around 50 miles offshore from St. ![]() Scientists will venture into the Green Banana’s depths next month, where they hope to answer longstanding questions about whether the sink hole - which extends around 275 feet, like an inverted, hourglass-shaped 20-story building, anchored in the ocean floor - connects to other sink holes and whether freshwater flows within. What it is is the Green Banana, one of the deepest blue holes ever discovered, according to Jim Culter, a senior scientist at Mote Marine Laboratory, and it’s on the verge of being studied in the most comprehensive way yet. One publication asked:“What Could It Be?” Headline after headline has offered a variation on the same theme: Scientists are flocking to a mysterious blue hole. This week, one particular blue hole - the Green Banana - has captured the imagination of many a land dweller. But to those who study them, they are still nearly as intriguing. These “blue holes,” as scientists call them, do not swallow up everything incapable of fighting their gravitational force, like their black hole cousins. Sprinkled across the ocean floor, invisible from the surface, are hundreds - or maybe thousands - of sink holes.
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