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Wednesday 31 October 2012

The Great Blue Hole

The Great Blue Hole is exactly what you’d think it is. It’s a great big blue hole off the coast of Belize in the country of Central America. You know, those other Americas below us, the ones with less Starbucks. That’s the two-cent definition, but let’s dig deeper—literally.

The Great Blue Hole is one of nature’s most beautiful accidents. It is really just a huge underwater sinkhole, but just like any of Mother Nature’s anomalies, it’s breathtaking. The sinkhole is almost perfectly circular in shape and runs just shy of one thousand feet across, and over four hundred feet in depth. Once just your everyday average twisted system of limestone caverns, it was formed during the last glacial period when the sea levels drastically began to lower and form into glaciers—get it, “glacial period”? Now it all makes sense. Mix a constant barrage of fresh water with the limestone surface of the seabed becoming exposed to the elements and after awhile you get—caverns. Fast forward some time later, the oceans begin to rise and gravity begins to take its toll, causing the roof to collapse, flooding the hollow system of caverns. This drastic change in depth is what give The Great Blue Hole its memorizing two-tone color effect, the dark blue of the deep water surrounded by the turquoise of the shallow water—like the earth sprouted a pupil to keep a watchful eye on the human race.

Nowadays, the Great Blue Hole is a popular tourist spot for scuba diving, but I have a different theory on what it really is.

Here are some amazing pics of Great Blue Hole













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