Middle Island Sinkhole

one of my favorite parts of my job of course is getting to scuba dive out into Lake hiron the cold freshwat is an amazing environment to protect these historic shipwreck sites it's also an amazing environment to see the Middle Island sinkhole you're off the shores of Middle Island the Middle Island Lighthouse is you know peeking above the the pine trees there on the island beautiful Caribbean Blue Waters uh about 30 ft deep and then it plummets to about 80 ft as you descend the moing buoy line you can you can see the the wall where the sinkhole collapsed and along that wall is filament that's that's cascading outward there's groundwater coming out at a pretty fast pace out of that that's the side of that wall and you can also see this bacterial mat that's this purple bright colored kind of funky looking bacterial mat that then descends to the what we call the arena in the sinkhole so a big you know maybe 100 square meters of of Lake Bottom where this purple mat thrives along with the purple mat is also some white mat um the the chemosynthetic bacteria that thrives there and then some brown mat so a really colorful place and this week we focusing on the brown mat because that's where the datom uh Thrive once we get to the the bottom of the the Middle Island sinkhole we are charged with collecting samples for the the biologists and the chemists that want to study this this ecosystem and so we take with us U cores and we have to take the stoppers off the ends and then very carefully uh try and capture this thin mat that's on the the very top layer of the sediment now the sediment is is very loose and as soon as you touch that sediment your visibility is gone and you you plummet that core into the sediment and then stick your hand way underneath as far as you can to to cap the bottom and then carefully lift it out swim up a few feet where you can see again and and see if you were successful in collecting that [Music] core [Music]