Mysterious 410ft Great Blue Hole in Belize hides a ‘concerning’ secret
Scientists have uncovered a ‘concerning’ trend after taking a sample from the Great Blue Hole off the coast of Belize.
They extracted a sediment core from the bottom of the 410ft (125m) marine sinkhole that has provided a 5,700-year storm archive.
The layers of sediment showed that over the past six millennia, on average, between four and 16 tropical storms pass over the hole per 100 years.
They also revealed that the frequency and intensity of these storms steadily rose, and then increased significantly over the past 20 years.
The researchers attribute the steady rise to natural climactic shifts and the recent uptick to man-made climate change.
The scientists from Goethe University in Frankfurt removed the 98ft (30m) sediment core from the underwater cave in 2022 after transporting a drilling platform to the Great Blue Hole.
Great Blue Hole facts
- The Great Blue Hole lies around 60 miles off the coast of Belize City and is part of the Belize Barrier Reef, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
- It was formed at the end of the last Ice Age when rising seawaters flooded a series of enormous caverns.
- It’s thought the caves were formed about 153,000 years ago and completely submerged around 15,000 years ago.
- The caves are are filled with giant stalactites, which show they once existed above water.
- The Hole is populated by several shark species including Caribbean reef sharks, nurse sharks, hammerheads, bull sharks, and black tip sharks
- It was ranked number one in the Discover Channel’s 10 Most Amazing Places on Earth list in 2012.
- Richard Branson joined an expedition team that travelled to the bottom of the hole, where they found plastic bottles on the sea bed.
(Credits: Getty Images)
They then examined the core, which is made up of hundreds of layers of coarse particles that have been transported from the nearby atoll reef by storm waves and surges.
The storm deposits have a different grain size, colour and composition from the fair-weather sediments, so researchers can tell them apart.
From this the research team, which also included scientists from Cologne, Göttingen, Hamburg, and Bern, worked out there had been 574 storm events over the past 5,700 years.
If the current rate continues, they believe up to 45 tropical storms and hurricanes could hit the Caribbean region by the end of the 21st century, far above the overall average of 16 every 100 years for the past six millennia.
The findings were published in journal Science Advances in March.
The research team wrote: ‘Predictions of tropical cyclone frequencies are hampered by insufficient knowledge of their natural variability in the past.
‘A 30m-long sediment core from the Great Blue Hole, a marine sinkhole offshore Belize, provides the longest available, continuous, and annually resolved tropical cyclone frequency record.
‘A 21st-century extrapolation suggests an unprecedented increase in tropical cyclone frequency, attributable to the Industrial Age warming.’
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