Beware the (seemingly) bottomless pit!
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It’s a massive underwater sinkhole, created naturally by caved-in bedrock. Pits like this one are found across the world, from the Great Barrier Reef to the Great Lakes.
Volcanologists in New Zealand peered down at a 60,000-year-old volcano that appeared when a sinkhole opened up in the ground near the city of Rotorua in 2018.
A skeleton discovered in the submerged Chan Hol cave near Tulum, Mexico, was estimated to be nearly 13,000 years old, giving further evidence to the idea that humans arrived in North American earlier than first assumed.
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The remains likely belonged to a young man and represent the third human specimen to be uncovered in the sunken caves.
In Lake Huron, a giant pit called the Middle Island Sinkhole houses thriving communities of bacteria and microbes.
They live in low-oxygen, high-sulfur conditions about 80 feet below the water’s surface — which researchers say is a comparable environment to the ones single-celled organisms inhabited billions of years ago.
Tortoises, crocodiles, lizards, snakes, bats, and at least 25 species of birds were uncovered from a blue hole called Sawmill Sink in the Bahamas. Researchers described their findings in a 2007 report in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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The fossils date back from 1,000 to 4,200 years old. Researchers say they can help us piece together what life may have been like when humans first arrived in the region.
These massive formations grow from mineral and sediment deposits over thousands of years.
When researchers probed the bottom of the Great Blue Hole in 2018, they saw prints from dead conches — sea snails — that had fallen into the pit.
Yep, litter has also been found at the bottom of the Great Blue Hole.
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Billionaire and Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson made a trip to the massive pit in 2019, noting that his team had spotted plastic bottles at the bottom.
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