20 Spectacular Discoveries Made By Divers In The Depths Of The Oceans
The depths of the world’s oceans and seas are the hiding place of many extraordinary enigmas and phenomena. From an ancient city famous for its fish sauce, to fish that make art, and from secret WWII code machines to 2,000 year-old computers, you never know what will turn up next. We’ve rounded up 20 of the most awesome things found by divers as they explore the depths – read on to be amazed.
20. Great Blue Hole, Belize
The extraordinary Great Blue Hole, set in the Caribbean Sea off the coast of Belize, is the largest sinkhole anywhere in the world. Many divers had explored the upper waters of the hole, which is 410 feet deep and 984 feet wide. But they hadn’t gone down to the depths for a very good reason. At around 290 feet the sinkhole is blanketed by a layer of highly poisonous hydrogen sulfide.
But in 2018 an expedition that included British tycoon Richard Branson and Fabien Cousteau, son of the legendary Jacques, found a way to explore the depths of the Great Blue Hole. The explorers used a three-person mini-submarine to reach the parts that no human diver could survive in. At the bottom they found stalactites, indicating that this was once a dry cave, probably flooded around 14,000 years ago when the last Ice Age ended. The submarine crew also made another much grimmer discovery – the bodies of two divers.
19. Chuuk Lagoon
Chuuk Lagoon, formerly known as Truk, is some 40 miles across at its widest and, according to The New York Times, is the “biggest graveyard of ships in the world.” The lagoon is located in a far-flung section of the central Pacific and belongs to the Federated States of Micronesia. The reason so many shipwrecks are sunk in the lagoon is the massive two-day naval battle that took place there in 1944. The U.S. Navy sank more than 30 Japanese vessels during the clash.
Back in the 1960s, recreational divers started to explore the lagoon, and it was popularized by a 1969 Jacques Cousteau documentary, Lagoon of Lost Ships. The pristine waters of the lagoon offer superb visibility, and all those sunken Japanese ships and planes provide “one of the great underwater wonders of the world,” diver Paul J. Tzimoulis, wrote in Skin Diver Magazine. If you ever dive there, just watch out for the live ammo!
