Next on Jonathan Bird's Blue World, a deep and spooky sinkhole in the Yucatan, with a mysterious false bottom! Hi, I'm Jonathan Bird and
welcome to my world! [ ♪ music ] This murky pond in the middle
of a Yucatan jungle might not
look like an exciting place to go for a dive. But as I'm
about to find out there's
something spectacular lurking beneath the surface. My day begins at Phantom Divers
in Playa del Carmen, Mexico.
They will be taking me on a dive to explore the sinkhole. We load the van and set off on
our adventure through the
jungle on miles of dirt roads. Finally we arrive at Muyal Ha.
It looks like a pond, but it's
an incredibly deep sinkhole. I can only image what I'll find
down there. A sinkhole is a formation that
used to be a cave, but a
section of the roof fell in, creating an opening to the
sunlight above. Then it fills
with water and sediment at the bottom. My guide is cave diver Carlos
Estrabeau, but everyone calls
him Charlie. We discuss the dive and he tells me what to
expect. Most importantly, it's
deep! Charlie shows me his favorite
way to get in the water. But
with scuba gear, I think I will go off the dock. We swim out into the middle of
the sinkhole, and it's time to
descend! As we descend I can see that
the water is not as clear as I
was expecting. Because this is a sinkhole and not a cave
system, the water is a bit
stagnant. At the center of the sinkhole
is a pile of debris including
tree branches that have fallen in from the surrounding forest,
including a lot of leaves like
this partially decomposed one. The light coming in from the
opening above shows that the
interior of the sinkhole is much larger than the opening
above. Around the sides of the cavern,
stalactites hang from the
ceiling, including some really big ones. As I descend deeper, markings
on the wall show where the
water level used to be when the water table was lower in
the past. There isn't much living down
here, but a few fish survive in
areas where the light
penetrates. Charlie directs me to a small
opening in the wall. It's a
little cave that just goes back a few meters. He leads me in to
investigate. On the ceiling is a type of
rock formation called popcorn
where the calcium carbonate has formed little round bumps. Deeper in the cave, Charlie
shows me the bones and teeth of
and animal that probably died in here thousands of years ago
when the cave was dry. They are encrusted with calcium
and I will not move them since
they have been unmoved for so long. Heading out of the cave, I
follow Charlie into the light
and then deeper down into the depths of the sinkhole. When we reach what appears to
be the bottom, I'm in for a
huge surprise. I can't believe my eyes, when Charlie sinks
into the bottom like it's a
cloud! It's not the bottom at all, but
a layer of sulfur that hangs
near the bottom in the motionless water. I sink down
with Charlie into the cloudy
layer. Underneath it turns reddish yellow. We're more than
100 feet deep. On the bottom are thousands of
years worth of decomposing
leaves which are the source of the sulfur cloud. No fish
can live down here. As I rise up out of the cloud,
I find more wispy cloud layers
to explore along the edge of the wall. It's really fun to swim through
them, like an airplane soaring
through the clouds in the sky. With our scuba tanks getting
low, it's now time to head back
to the surface. The dim light from above is a welcome
sight as I ascend. Man, that was wild. The water
in the bottom of the sinkhole
is so calm that the sulfur layer just lays there and it
looks like sand. It looks like
the bottom of the sinkhole, but then you realize when you
put your hand in it and your
whole body will go down into it like a could. That was just
weird, I have never seen
anything like that. So cool! My dive in Muyal Ha sinkhole
was an exciting combination of
creepy and mysterious. It's another example of the wonders
of the blue world, in a place where you would
never expect it. [ ♪ music ]
Be careful of the ghost leviathan
This keeps popping up with n my YouTube because I started watching diving videos - because of Subnautica lol
Why wouldn’t they pick up those bones?? They could find out what once lived there....or maybe still does....