Diving deep into caves to remove 100 years of trash

[Music] [Applause] [Music] hi everyone welcome back to croatia where today we have our first day of action cleaning a underwater cave system the cave we are cleaning is called jopechisa and is located near augulen in croatia this type of cave is part of the car's topography of this region characterized by a complex maze of interconnected cave systems sinkholes and above ground streams as a consequence of this some fascinating ecosystems have flourished in these caves with some really unusual creatures and sometimes when the caves are isolated for long enough they may even contain species that only exist in a single cave much like a lonely island in a vast ocean this particular cave is home to the om listed by the iucn as vulnerable to extinction the croatian days which is only known to exist in this cave and is listed as critically endangered by the iucn and unappeals subterraneous which is the only freshwater sponge in the world that lives in caves and currently isn't even on the icn list due to data deficiency in the past this cave was used as a dump site and while a lot of surface waste has been removed there's still the underwater waste to contend with the mix of trash down there includes large plastic and metallic objects and electronic appliances with an estimated volume of approximately 16 cubic meters many of these materials take centuries to degrade and will continue to release toxic chemicals into the cave water if they are not removed this is a unique and wonderful world that lives on the edge of what is known to science and on the brink of extinction which is why thiago one of our biologists here at mossy earth selected this project for us to carry out with the funds from our amazing mossy earth members our plan for this cleanup is to split into two teams one from each side of the cave system dusan who you might recognize from david attenborough's documentary called attenborough's ark will dive with thomas love on one side and they will try to bring up the trash up to the pit from where it will be pulled up with ropes it is very easy to get the rubbish in but arabic out rubbish out is more complicated there is a big cooking stove inside so we need to try to break it apart and then uh take piece by piece so that that will probably be a challenge [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] so i'm here with uh setting up the ropes so that we can go down the pit and this is where we will be extracting the the waste from so essentially the waste that they'll be collecting but through the diving it will all have to come out through here and yeah that's the plan and it's a good [Music] one on the other side we have petra we'll dive with nevin to try and clean up as much as they can with the lower visibility of the lake and bring out the trash directly there they also have a side mission to go check on the fresh water sponges and see how they are doing [Music] back in the pit the first team is starting to pull out some of the waste [Music] foreign [Music] it was difficult quite difficult yeah so the water still flows inside so like when we are taking it out it flows uh into us and like some pieces are quite big it's like you know it gets a lot full yeah but the good thing is that the endemic fish are here uh i saw at least like 100 of them wow which is like usual usually previously you wouldn't maybe see five six of them and that's it but now the populations are recovering in the lake petra and evan have run into the largest piece of waste we have found today a wheel as the rest of the team was finished we joined forces to try and pull it out with a rope we will what he proposes there is a hole in the part of this big wheel we will take the rope through the center and just clip it on the other side and then pull it out because of the weight and the state is in once it's in the shell we can expect it to fall apart [Music] so what was the conclusion patch are too heavy to lift we need a leaf bag a big a big lift bag to get that wheel out we will need to come back next time with a large lift bag so we can lift it using air nevertheless the day was a great success we took out a decent portion of the trash already and we are confident we should be able to get the cave clean in a few more dives for those of you wondering whether we can stop new trash from getting in the divers have told me that they only find old trash in this cave well we are confident based on that we don't find any new waste so like all the stuff are quite old and like already rusty and stuff so some actually have historic value like today we had this bicycle uh taken out which is probably like a unique you know now it's like very very interesting uh but uh we are sure that now people because we get involved with with local people they help out and also they get a kind of a sense of that somebody you know uh should care about this kind of system so it's actually we don't find any any new waste as much as we see in these kind of systems well occasionally in some but this area here i must say is really good and people already are much more focused to tourism than to let's say industry yeah and so this is when you get this kind of switch that i would say when we remove it now i don't expect that we'll find any big quantities in the future if you made it this far into the video and you're not a member yet please consider checking out our mossy earth membership for the price of a couple of starbucks every month you will be planting trees with us and funding highly targeted rewilding and conservation projects such as this one we focus on getting the most bang for your buck in terms of restoring and protecting nature by working with key species and fragile ecosystems in different regions this project to help the olm is a great example and it falls under one of my favorite programs called the ugly ones which aims to support less charismatic species and ecosystems that are underfunded and under protected so if you're curious head over to mossy.earth to learn more until next time cheers

Channel: Mossy Earth

Views: 17,875

Keywords: rewilding, cave diving, clean-up, diving, Mossy Earth

Id: Q-Nc3kFCqRA

Length: 10min 1sec (601 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 04 2021