https://www.yoursun.com/venice/deep-dives-to-green-
A diver indicate he's doing OK as he and another diver descend to Green Banana-about 400 feet down and 50 miles west of Venice-essentially a cave at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. PROVIDED BY FLORIDA ATLANTIC UNIVERSITY
About 50 miles west of Venice, a team from four organizations worked to send scientists down hundreds of feet below the surface to explore a blue hole called Green Banana.
Little was known about the blue holes, but more is being learned now.
The week-long expedition in September has already provided information that has changed some initial thoughts.
It was led by Mote Marine Laboratory scientist Emily Hall with assistance from Jim Culter along with teams from Florida Atlantic University’s Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute, Georgia Institute of Technology and the U.S. Geological Survey.
FAU supplied some of the “citizen scientist” deep sea divers, including Marty Watson, lead diver on the expedition.
“I’ve developed a reputation in the diving community of being one of the deepest divers ever — that’s still alive,” Watson said. “I’ve been well-known to do a lot of salvage stuff at very deep depths. I’ve had the ability to do the projects that people thought couldn’t be done.”
He did an “exploratory” dive a few days before the expedition began — having a team member a few hundred feet above him as he did a looksee into Green Banana. And there were a few surprises at about 415 feet down in the back of the cave.
“Lots of fishing lines and lures,” he said.
He’s not sure how they got there — just that they were momentarily problematic and unexpected.
He explored the area and looked around the cavern.
“The visibility was really bad — the best, 10 feet,” he said. “It’s less stressful when you’re alone in harsh conditions. It’s easier to be alone in some cases.”
Watson and David DeBerard returned a few days later to establish the 600-pound benthic lander that took samples and other scientific readings from Green Banana.
And they weren’t the only living thing near the cave.
“There’s hardly anything alive at that depth ... did see a shell crab at about 400 feet. He was walking around and having a good ole’ time,” Watson said, laughing as he recalled it.
Watson, 48, previously worked with Mote Marine and other groups in 2019 when they worked Amberjack Hole which is about 350 feet deep. He’s always onboard to go overboard for science, he said.
He got his first license as a teenager in 1991.
“And it never stopped. It was always a dream of mine to become another Jacques Cousteau.”
Stephannie Kettle, with Mote Marine, said a lot of information is being gleamed by scientists.
“They are still pouring through the samples,” she said.
Another exhibition is slated for May 2021, weather dependent.
But they are realizing a few things already. Blue holes are not all the same. They had anticipated the caves at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico would be similar in many ways.
“The makeup and some of the chemistry and water flow are definitely different,” she said.
Kettle said, with the many different groups and dealing with weather, it was “as smooth as something as big an undertaking as this is can be.”
“Everyone works together to accomplish these tasks during 12-hour days for five days in a row is really cool,” she said.
Mote Marine has started a blog at its website for people interested in learning about the exhibition and science from it, Kettle said. It’s at www.mote.org/deepthoughts.
Hall was the first scientist to write to the blog about the experience. She notes how she felt about the diving in her first blog.
“I really enjoy seeing the plans come together,” Hall writes online. “The diving is AMAZING!!! and I’ve gotten to meet some super cool citizen scientists (our dive team volunteers) throughout this process. Seeing the data and trying to tell a story is also very rewarding.”
For Watson, the reward is assisting.
“Anything I can do to help science, even as a volunteer, that’s what it’s about. That’s what we do. Anything to help research,” he said.
And its “definitely” never another day at the office, he said. But it went well.
“We did our job and gave (scientists) the opportunity to gather the data they needed to gather.”
He called exploration his “fuel.”
“I want to go to places where no one else can go and I like to support science,” Watson said. “To see what’s going on underneath the ocean floors — and I can get there. If I can help these people, I want to help them. And that’s my fuel.”
And he has his own theories on blue holes.
“I think there’s an aquifer below the Gulf of Mexico and below the Atlantic. ... We’ve proved that there’s a flow — below these. This isn’t just a pit. There is an aquifer. And it has to be tied to our drinking water.”
He thinks that’s important to know.
Watson is an expert in cave diving and has explored a variety of wrecks, including World War II German U-boats and 1800s shipwrecks in the Gulf of Mexico.
Exploration may be his fuel, but there is another thing going on when he’s places that no human has gone before.
“The things I’ve witnessed and got to see: It’s indescribable,” he said.
Ali H. Johnston, MBA in Real Estate
