The Blue Hole Belize Expedition 2018 has completed its mission to explore the bottom of the Great Blue Hole, the second largest karst cave in the world.
The cave is located in the Caribbean Sea off the coast of Belize. The formation is a small oceanic coral atoll with a diameter of about 300 meters and a depth of 124 meters, which attracts tourists and divers from all over the world with its beauty.
The expedition was led by Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group and director of the Ocean Unite initiative, and French oceanographer Fabienne Cousteau, grandson of the famous Jacques-Yves Cousteau.
As a result of the mission, the researchers were able to map the bottom of the Blue Hole using sound waves and make several unexpected discoveries.
In particular, experts discovered stalactites that formed at a time when the sea level was 150 meters lower than modern, and the Great Blue Hole was not yet under water.
In the lower part of the cave, the team also found a whole "graveyard" of snails and shellfish, which died in it due to lack of oxygen.
However, another discovery, but much more disturbing, was the presence of a large number of plastic bottles. “The real monsters that can kill the ocean are climate change and plastic,” one expedition member lamented on her Facebook page.
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According to experts, plastic waste is becoming a real disaster for the oceans of the 21st century.