Featured Image Credit: TikTok/@fueled.by.donuts
Topics: Nature, Travel, Science, Environment, Climate Change
Emily Brown
Topics: Nature, Travel, Science, Environment, Climate Change
If you were faced with something called the 'Great Blue Hole', would you swiftly run away, or go ahead and dive straight into it?
Your answer probably says a lot about you as a person, and I'll be interested to see whether anyone who answered 'dive straight into it' will still feel the same after seeing footage of what that actually looks like.
Shared by TikTok user fueled.by.donuts, the video shows the diver starting her descent with the caption, 'into the darkness we go'.
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That alone would be enough to put me off, but the TikToker kept going and stumbled upon a whole host of both interesting and terrifying sights.
Located in Belize, the Great Blue Hole is a natural sinkhole which measures approximately 1,000 feet across and 400 feet deep.
It's so big that it can actually be seen from space, and as a result, it's become a 'bucket list' item for a lot of scuba diving enthusiasts.
Inside the hole, the TikToker dives down as far as 130 feet deep and reveals innocent sights like rock formations, as well as more horrifying discoveries like multiple sharks.
Running into a shark is a situation to be avoided at the best of times, but in a dark cave with hundreds of feet of water above you is probably one of the worst places to encounter them.
It didn't put the TikToker off, though, as she shared the video with the caption: "Such a cool experience!"
Obviously everyone has their own ideas of what they consider a 'cool experience', and while this particular one probably isn't for everyone, there were a lot of viewers who expressed their own desire to visit the Great Blue Hole.
Not every trip to the Great Blue Hole is quite so pleasant, though, as other divers have been met with sights like trash, or even the morbid discovery of two bodies in the hole.
The remains were believed to belong to divers who had gone missing in the huge cavern.
Virgin founder Richard Branson has also explored the Great Blue Hole, and was left stunned afterwards at realizing how climate change had impacted the ocean.
In a post on Virgin.com, he wrote: "The Blue Hole is made of a complex system of caves that once formed on dry land. It is proof of how oceans can rise quickly and catastrophically.
"Sea levels were once hundreds of feet lower. 10,000 years ago the sea level rose by about 300 feet when a lot of ice melted around the world.
"At 300 feet down you could see the change in the rock where it used to be land and turned into sea."
Branson added that the scene was 'one of the starkest reminders of the danger of climate change [he's] ever seen'.