Jill Heinerth, a cave diver with 7,000+ dives, recounts her harrowing 2000 expedition to Antarctica’s B-15 iceberg, where she faced 60-foot seas, collapsed ice entrances, and near-fatal glove leaks while filming ancient life like amphipods. Her work—from mapping Egypt’s Nubian aquifer to exploring Lanzarote’s Atlantita Cave—reveals hidden ecosystems, including Moonidopsis crabs studied by astrobiologists, and ties to NASA’s Europa missions. A "citizen scientist," she also documented Mayan cenotes with ritual remains and bioluminescent cave creatures, dismissing underwater bases but warning of human-driven environmental collapse. Heinerth’s upcoming Cuba dives and book promise more uncharted discoveries before time runs out. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you may be, in all 25 prolific time zones, covered like a blanket by this program, Midnight in the Desert.
I'm Mark Bell.
Rules of the Road, simple, no bad language on this show.
No really bad language, and one call per show.
That's the rule.
All right, so there's a lot to talk about.
It's going to be a very, very busy night.
And boy, do I have a guest for you, Jill Heinerth, coming up in a little bit on underwater cave exploration.
I'm sure Jill's a very nice lady, but I think anybody who goes underwater into a cave system is out of their mind.
But, you know, that's just me.
We're going to find out all about it.
She does amazing things, and I would recommend you to my website for a number of things.
But let me begin here because, of course, the Paris attacks.
The CIA director says more attacks are likely in the pipeline.
There were to be seen today lots of ISIS guys on CNN saying, Europe, we got you and we're going to get you again, and America, you're next.
If our intel agencies, if the NSA is strained to keep up with everybody who's here or might be here or has bad plans, then we're in big trouble.
Lots of raids in France associated with, and Belgium, associated with a bunch of arrests.
They arrested a whole group of even suspected people.
So we know the Paris area was shocked by a major terrorist attack Friday night as being claimed by the Neo-Caliphate, I like that phrase, terrorist group ISIS.
But just hours before the attack was carried out, Facebook removed a key anonymous group responsible for identifying and reporting thousands of social media accounts used by ISIS recruiters.
Now, let's think about that.
Anonymous on our side in the sense that they're exposing groups planning to attack us, right?
Now, regardless of what you think about ISIS, their origins, and who is pulling the strings and funding them, one thing is clear.
They've been spreading their ideology and recruiting using Facebook and Twitter more than on-the-ground traditional methods.
We talked about this last week.
The anonymous group Red Cult initiated an operation to counter the ISIS social media presence called hashtag OPISIS.
Operation ISIS, in other words.
We at Counter Current News, that's where this story came from, have been the primary contact point for OpISIS from the start, and we continue to be today.
That's why our source in the Red Cult told us today that a group calling itself Report ISIS Accounts run by Anonymous was removed by Facebook, and the administrators from the group all banned.
The anonymous group, Red Cult, initiated an operation to counter the ISIS social media presence called, again, OP ISIS.
And, you know, you've got to ask why.
Why keep Anonymous from doing the job that American and European law enforcement either are unable to do or overstrained or unwilling to do?
Exposing accounts used by ISIS to operate and recruit on social media.
Facebook has refused to respond to inquiries from Red Cult or from Countercurrent News and several other alternative media outlets who have contacted them directly.
Now, Facebook, as you know, has its own terms of service agreement.
What I want you to hear is a message that I have on my Facebook.
If you can take looking at this masked ISIS face.
And I want to play this for you here on the air.
The only thing you're missing is video.
If you go to my website, you're not going to miss that.
It's up there for you right now.
But here's what they are saying.
This is kind of an ISIS sort of introduction right now.
Which is worth watching, by the way.
The video you're listening to, available on my website.
This is, of course, from our friends at Anonymous.
unidentified
Greetings citizen of the world, and Facebook, we are Anonymous Red Cult, as most of you know.
We're engaged in Operation ISIS from some time now, to fight ISIS online in different ways, like taking down ISIS sites, leaking information, exposing ISIS accounts on social media sites, one of our groups on Facebook called Report ISIS Accounts,
with the URL, www.facebook.com slash group slash LPSIS, and it's dedicated to posting report ISIS accounts from YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites, where we reported and deactivated thousands of accounts.
Accounts they used to communicate, recruit, and spread ISIS propaganda.
Few hours ago, Facebook decided to close this group, and block the events for three days, without giving any explanation for it, except, quote, we removed the post below because it doesn't follow the Facebook community standards, end of quote.
So we asked, is it because ISIS supporters reported us back, and if so, for what reason, or Facebook is bothered from us reporting terrorists' accounts, that violate Facebook community standards anyway, by using fake names, and posting inappropriate and violent propaganda, that only serve ISIS terrorism, we asked, is this one of the new Facebook policies, to protect terrorists' accounts, instead of fighting it, or simply Facebook doesn't care?
We leave this for the public opinion, to judge this action by Facebook, action that can only be interpreted that Facebook took a wrong decision.
I also think it's incredibly strange because from what I've observed, Anonymous in general and the Red Cult in particular have had varying success with having the accounts of ISIS recruiters taken offline.
But they seem to be getting hit.
But Anonymous seems to periodically get its own presence knocked offline and then brought back with no explanation.
The Op ISIS page being taken offline just hours before the massacre in Paris began is extremely strange.
I did a little bit of research earlier today and discovered that after, or not too long after the massacre was over and the Carnage was being cleaned up, the Op ISIS page was mysteriously brought back online without any comment from Facebook management or Facebook content management, I should say.
So, in other words, you don't know if they reported you for some weird thing, reported them for some weird thing, and that's why it was taken down.
unidentified
It's possible.
It's possible that some number of people in ISIS had reported that page and asked it to be taken down.
And because Facebook is somewhat notorious for its real name policy, and by real name policy, I mean if you get out of bed with your right foot on first instead of your left foot, they may freeze your account.
Well then, why in heaven's name doesn't our government, through some back door, share, allow information to be shared with them?
Is there any of that going on, or can you not comment?
unidentified
I have no idea.
My thought is that is not the case simply because governments tend to not like working with fifth columns and anonymous is sort of the ultimate fifth column.
So would you imagine that my Facebook account, which I do enjoy, is now in some jeopardy or do you think it will remain up there?
unidentified
I don't think it's in any jeopardy, at least not immediately, unless someone decides that they're not an Art Bell fan and decides to hit that little report button.
Well, I have been signed, sealed, delivered with a, you know, I believe I had to send a picture ID and I had to send my driver's license.
So they should know who I am, but I guess they could have temporary amnesia.
unidentified
They could.
Facebook's content management team is extremely large.
It's spread across multiple continents, but they all have more or less equal access and authority to do what they're charged with, which is determine who is and is not allowed to use the service.
As I said, the headline you can take away from that last was anonymous, is it war with ISIS?
And if I were ISIS, that would be the last thing I'd want to hear.
The very last thing.
All right, coming up now, Jill Hunterth is an aquanaut who is recognized as one of the planet's great underwater explorers.
More people have walked on the moon than have been to some of the remote places that Jill has explored here on Earth.
An expert in one of the world's most dangerous endeavors, cave diving.
Even the words give me a chill.
Jill is a photographer, filmmaker, author, and instructor with over 7,000 scuba dives to her credit.
Jill wrote, produced, and starred in the PBS documentary series, Water's Journey, and has led numerous National Geographic and NOAA expeditions.
Jill is a monthly columnist for Diver Magazine.
Her articles and photos have appeared in publications as diverse as the National Geographic and the Wall Street Journal.
She is a fellow of the National Speleological Society.
I hope that's close.
The Speleological Society.
I'm not sure.
We'll get it from Jill.
The Explorers Club, the Royal National Canadian Geographical Society, Jill is, in fact, a well-respected voice now, in the discussion, rather, about water conservation and her We Are Water Project and documentary film, which has won several environmental awards.
Jill, most of us, I think, myself included, in a million years, I can't imagine suiting up in whatever with whatever tanks, re-breathable or otherwise, and going into a cave under the water.
Yeah, I mean, the darkness repels most people, just the darkness alone.
But if you put someone underwater in complete darkness, it would be absolutely terrifying to most.
But, you know, for me, it's, you know, looking around that dark corner, it's an invitation to go someplace that nobody's ever been before and see something remarkable that's never been recorded.
I mean, you know, we simply have so much to learn about our oceans, the depths, as well as underwater caves.
I like to think of myself as someone who's swimming inside the veins of Mother Earth.
I mean, I think we could all agree that the Earth is this living body, and I'm like in the circulation system, in the lifeblood, and I kind of feel like my job is to report back on what I see and the changes that I see as well.
So sometimes it takes a big team to pull off an expedition or a mission.
I do quite a lot on my own as well because there are times when it's, you know what, we're squeezing through a small space, and you're better off on your own than having someone else become the cork in the bottle that contains your life.
Yeah, well, in many of the movies about this sort of thing, they show people inevitably squeaking through these little places with their tank sort of getting caught on something.
I mean, that close is the space that you can barely make it through.
I mean, that's the ultimate dream of cave diving explorers is to go someplace where nobody's been before and be the first to run a line and then survey an underwater cave.
So the dangers you face when you are exploring underwater caves, as insane as that seems, especially if it's a cave that's never been mapped or explored before, I imagine that's really freaky.
Oh, I mean, it's exhilarating because not only are the passages new, but the things that you could potentially discover within those spaces could be something completely new to science.
So then do you, when you encounter a new life form of some sort or a new who knows what, do you gather some samples of things and bring them back for analysis?
So usually I'm kind of the hands and the eyes of scientists who make that their specialty.
So they may tell me what they need or tell me what to photograph or document.
But yeah, we do bring back these swimming animals as well as other things like sponges and algal samples.
And some of those have absolutely remarkable potential medicinal qualities, like anti-cancer agents and antibacterial qualities that are hundreds of times more powerful than what we find in similar animals in the ocean.
In the year 2000, my team and I were planning to go to Antarctica to follow in the footsteps of Sir Ernest Shackleton and his early explorations.
And the night before our pitch to National Geographic, the largest iceberg in recorded history calved off of the Antarctic ice shelf, the Ross ice shelf.
Well, yeah, it was a real interesting project, probably the most interesting and perhaps the most dangerous of my life.
The largest iceberg in recorded history calved away from the Ross Ice Shelf and started floating into the Ross Sea, and it was the size of Jamaica.
And literally the night before we were to make a pitch to National Geographic, we completely changed the course of our story concept because we realized the significance that if things the size of Jamaica are breaking off of Antarctica, then what does that mean?
And back in 2000, the words global climate change were pretty fresh in everybody's vocabulary.
Well, instead of just following the course of Sir Ernest Shackleton from New Zealand south to the Ross Sea, we decided to intercept this iceberg.
And we told National Geographic that we were going to climb it, we were going to study the ice edge ecology, and that we were going to go cave diving inside of the actual iceberg itself.
You know, for that particular project, I was really in charge of designing the diving technology that we would use, and I wanted to use a device called a rebreather.
And when we applied for our permit to the National Science Foundation in order to go to Antarctica, they declined to give us a permit.
So most scuba divers dive with a tank on their back of just breathing air.
And every time they exhale, they make bubbles and they sort of waste the exhaled breath.
But a rebreather is just like the same technology you use in a spacesuit.
So it's a closed circuit device and it captures the exhaled breath, scrubs the carbon dioxide out of it, and then injects a tiny bit of oxygen back into the breathing media so that you're back to the amount that you require for metabolism.
Well, that's the beauty of the technology, really, because it gives us a range in terms of depth and time that we can't possibly reach with normal scuba.
Because a normal scuba tank, the deeper you go, the faster you use it up.
But with a rebreather, you could have even as long as 20 hours underwater with a very small gas supply, as opposed to 10, 20, 50, even 100 tanks required to do the same dive if it's a deep one.
That is a gigantic increase in time you can spend in the water and probably an increase in the danger for spending that much time in the water, I would think, as well.
Yeah, well, I mean, there's obviously the danger of just the exposure in the environment, But also, you're carrying like a life support equipment, a gas mixing station on your back, and you're constantly manipulating the gases that you're breathing.
So the deeper you go, the more you have to reduce the oxygen.
The deeper you go, you have to get rid of nitrogen and replace it with helium.
And so there's a constant revision of the breathing gas that's occurring to optimize it for your dive.
Well, you have a really long time that you have to take to carefully come up in stages.
We call that decompression time.
And you have to slowly reacclimate your body and slowly ramp up the oxygen again so that you can rid your body of the inert gases like helium and nitrogen.
And if you don't, then you can suffer from decompression illness.
I mean, the first time you dive in really cold water is the toughest, but you do kind of get used to it.
And you have to be really careful when you get out of the water because you're usually in a significantly colder environment as soon as you're out of the water.
So then does the temperature or anything else limit you've got the rebreather, and I understand that, but are you limited in the amount of time you can spend underwater in those conditions?
Before we continue with Ice Island, and we're going to, I'm really curious, you're 50 now, when did you get started with this and how did you get started?
You know, what's fascinating about those, obviously that was formed when the cave was dry.
So, you know, water soaks down through the ground and drips from the ceiling and just literally takes one drop of calcite at a time to make those giant mounds.
And I've worked with paleoclimatologists and physicists who take these giant stellag mites and they cut them and look at them like rings of a tree.
And do you know they can actually count back those rings and look at the ancient climate on Earth?
They can go back like 350,000 years in some of these formations and see what climate was like at other times.
Well, we were rejected by the National Science Foundation, so we had to apply to another country because you need a permit to go to Antarctica.
So New Zealand took us with open arms, and the U.S. wrote us a letter saying that if we got into trouble, don't expect American assets to come and help.
So we went, very confident that we had the best and safest plan possible for the environment.
This is like the craziest seas on the planet where like storms can go all the way around the Earth unimpeded and brew up the seas like you can't imagine.
And 60-foot seas for days on end.
And in fact, one of those Russian icebreakers that you were talking about was in the Ross Sea at the same time.
And they were a day ahead of us experiencing 100-foot seas.
Well, by boat, it would have been pretty tough because the sea ice, even at the end of the summer, is like freezing north at like a mile per day.
And in the year that we went, the sea ice was very difficult.
So when we finally encountered the pack, we didn't anticipate how difficult it would be to move through the sea ice.
And my first thought was, wow, you know, I thought we're looking at global climate change here.
And then it occurred to me that all the sea ice is just even more evidence of everything that was, you know, breaking up and filling the Ross Sea that summer.
So we got down there, and the next thing that occurred to us was, how do you know when you're actually there?
When you're trying to encounter something that's the size of Jamaica, I mean, it's literally, you know, fills the horizon.
We lost satellite contact about 100 miles south of New Zealand.
So we were basically black, like off the radar, for two months, with the exception of this incredible woman in New Zealand who had a radio, and she could reach us, and she could reach the Russian icebreakers down there.
So for the journey, we had to take the helicopter apart and then reassemble it when we got back down there and got to some reasonable sea conditions where we could work.
And even in transit, the helicopter Took such a beating.
The electrical system was still wired to the battery, and all the wiring literally dissolved in the salt water from the seas we were taking on.
And so the first thing we had to do was rewire a helicopter, and not a single person on the boat was an aircraft mechanic.
Well, she was able to communicate with some of the other Russian icebreakers down there and was able to give us their position and what they were seeing.
And with that and the helicopter, we sort of slowly moved our way through the pack.
We got stuck in the pack for a couple of days, completely sealed around with sea ice.
Wow.
That was a little scary because, you know, in Shackleton's footsteps, the last thing you want to do is end up like his ships and get crushed.
So as it was breaking up, at times we were even anchoring ourselves to pieces of it and moving with it.
And you could move even 20 or 30 miles in the course of a day, not feeling like you're moving at all because you're moving with the ice.
That's right.
So very dynamic.
But we finally decided To conduct our biggest cave dives in a piece of it that had ripped up on the seafloor and gotten stuck near a place called Cape Hallett, which is actually the first place where people wintered in Antarctica and spent a whole year.
And it was at that location that we very tentatively first dove inside these crevices and started to look around.
And in this first big cave dive, my partner and I went in through a crack, basically, in the ice, and it was probably 20 feet across.
And the surface of that crack looked like the dimples on a golf ball, like it had been carved by the movement of the water.
And we moved in through that crack, and all we could see is blackness below us.
And so we just went down and down and down.
And at 130 feet, we hit the seafloor.
And I looked off to my right, and there was this just vast tunnel leading off into the blackness beneath the iceberg.
So we turned and went inside, and where it was in contact with the seafloor, we saw this incredible garden of life, like filter-feeding animals just, you know, grabbing things out of the current that was rushing by.
So it was beautiful.
I mean, it was remarkable.
Now, on that particular dive, we heard sounds.
You know, the ice is loud.
It's cracking.
It's thudding.
It's groaning.
It's kind of alarming.
But, you know, I didn't quite know the meaning of those sounds at that point.
And when we turned to come back out the way we'd gone in, the whole environment had changed.
And what we didn't know is that in our time inside the iceberg, a big piece had calved off the entrance and had basically, to the eyes of the people topside, closed the door that we'd gone in.
And that actually proved to be problematic during the project because it's easy to get away from being in the line of sight of the boat when you're surrounded by ice, even if you're in the open water.
But that ended up not being sort of the worst of our troubles.
As we continued in the project and began doing more and more dives and filming inside the iceberg, we started to experience crazy currents that would come up out of nowhere.
We were actually approaching the full moon when the tidal currents can be stronger, but we were finding it impossible to predict when these raging currents would hit us.
And they have some sort of an antifreeze component to their bloodstream.
And they occupy these holes in the ice when they're trying to hide from the current.
And I had noticed this on other dives.
So my solution for getting up that ice wall was to evict the ice fish and jam my fingers into their burrows and use those like handholds so that we could pull ourselves up.
I mean, I got out of the water, and the first words to the chief science officer were, the cave tried to keep us today.
And we sat down and took our equipment off, but we decided we needed one last bit of footage.
And we decided that we would prepare our gear, have a meal, and we would post a watch on the deck, a watch that could tell us when the current finally lessened.
So we sat down to a meal, and I heard screams on the deck.
There was no doubt that something terrifying was happening.
So we dropped our meals, we ran up on deck, and the entire face of the ice that we were just inside was exploding and crumbling and calving and throwing up this huge wave towards us.
And within the course of minutes, it became just like brash sea ice as far as we could see.
Well, I mean, if you think about like an ice cube that you drop into a drink on a hot summer day, you know how it cracks and falls apart sometimes.
Probably what happened in this Antarctic summer is that during the day as things warmed up and the cracks had melt water dripping through them, in the evenings they would freeze again and stress that giant ice cube we were inside.
And eventually the current and the cracks and the stress and all of it was just more than this piece we were inside could bear and it fell apart.
Yeah, so imagine that this used to be part of the Ross Ice Shelf, so part of the whole continent of Antarctica.
So, you know, really, as you're diving down, you're diving back through history through, you know, layers and layers and layers of snow that's been compacted into ice.
So sometimes the layers are, you know, thinner or whiter, less compact.
And at other times, it's like as clear as glass.
And you can see things in the ice, you know, like dirt and even, you know, organisms and things that are frozen in that matrix.
So it's the same stuff that people core, and yet we were able to swim down through it.
But because the current's ripping through all of these cracks and crevices, then that's bringing food to organisms that can live in these strange places.
And so, yeah, some people may sort of thumb their nose at that.
But really, the kinds of scientists that work on these extreme expeditions realize that because they've dedicated their life to some very specialized aspect of science, they can't possibly be prepared to do the kind of dives that we are because we've dedicated our lives to exploration technology.
So it's a partnership.
It's a collaboration.
And it's really exciting when you get to work with people that enjoy that collaboration.
So in some cases, but you're talking about the kind of infrastructure that's only available for a really high-end kind of project with a lot of funding.
Most of the time, we're kind of scrappy and we don't have that kind of support available to us.
I mean, quite beautifully decorated caves along the coast and then fascinating, you know, deeper caves inland, you know, filled with the remains of Mayan civilization.
We have been describing what it's like to dive underwater into caves in the Antarctic.
If you can believe that, I didn't even know people were able to do something Like this, much less that I was about to have somebody on the air who did it.
It's just unbelievable to me.
It seems like it would be so inhospitable to human beings that you just couldn't do it.
But obviously you can, sort of.
Don't you have sort of a worry, Jill, about stuff like being buried alive?
I mean, the truth of the matter is when anything goes wrong, you have to push all the emotions aside and you just have to be pragmatic and just take one small step at a time, not knowing necessarily how it's all going to work out, but knowing that you're making the best next step towards survival.
Okay, so what you're doing is so dangerous that in a way, I would imagine you kind of have to make peace in your own mind about the fact that it could cost you your life.
Well, I mean, that's a discussion I have to have with my family, too.
I mean, it certainly terrifies, you know, my husband, but he has, you know, come to terms with the fact that he understands that what I do is my passion and that that's what makes me who I am.
So taking these risks is a part of living fully for me.
So my colleagues and I, quite soon after the Arab Spring, took a journey across the western desert of Egypt, following in Alexander's footsteps, because I'd read in historical record that Alexander made this journey with his army to a place called the Temple of Jupiter Amun in Siwa.
And it was there he was called by an oracle to visit this temple.
And the oracle told him that he was the first true pharaoh of Egypt.
And Alexander had an interest in underwater exploration.
And it turns out that the oracle was a well.
And Alexander actually thought that the oracle well was attached to other parts of the settlement underground.
Well, it turns out that Egypt, Libya, Chad, and Sudan sit on the oldest fossil aquifer on the planet, the largest fossil aquifer on the planet, meaning that it only rains in that part of Egypt once every 25 years or so.
So the water in the aquifer is not being replenished.
So it's still coming out of the ground in these oases springs, and it's creating an opportunity for agriculture, you know, date ponds and other things.
So we checked these things out, and they were often surrounded by Roman or Greek era walls to contain the water.
Yeah, pretty amazing and connected oftentimes through these large irrigation channels and sometimes underground through stone sort of pipeways to move Water from place to place.
Yeah, so the Romans and the Greeks that had occupied the area had made very elaborate irrigation structures like above and below ground to move water around.
And I'd really like to go back because I still think there's so much that we can learn from that area.
There's so many Roman Greek remains and ruins that are just sticking out of the sand in this very remote part of the desert.
It's the longest submerged lava tube cave on Earth that has been so far explored by divers.
So it's literally part of the Monte Corona volcano on Lenzarote.
And we went there, again, to look at the unique biology within these cave systems and hoping to find something that hadn't been recorded by science before.
So some of the animals that are in the tunnel to Atlantis, Atlantita Cave, are this little teeny crab called Moonidopsis.
It's the only place on Earth where we find Moonidopsis other than on the deep smoking ocean vents, those hot steaming chemical vents.
And there's actually scientists who are astrobiologists who spend their entire life studying those types of animals that we find in caves because it seems to be the closest correlation to the type of life we could find in outer space.
And actually, I participated in a project here where we created the first ever three-dimensional map of a cave system.
And the device that we used to map that cave system has now morphed into an artificially intelligent autonomous vehicle that has a mission now with NASA to go to Jupiter's moon, Europa, and do just that.
We've literally run a guideline and measured everything with a standard compass and knotted guideline or with measuring tapes.
But I've also, as I said, worked on projects where we use things like this sonar mapper developed by Bill Stone, which could measure the distance from the mapper to the walls of the cave in 32 directions, like four times a second, and bring back all that data.
We can do 360-degree filming and create basically virtual reality environments and high-resolution three-dimensional models of artifacts that could be printed or shared digitally for scientists to look at too, with unforeseen accuracy, unbelievable accuracy.
Yeah, so sometimes it works that way, where I get a call, whether it's from a scientist or whether it's from, you know, Hollywood for movie making.
And then sometimes it's the other way around where I or my team come up with the idea and then we seek out the scientists to look at what we found.
So in the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, when we have found, you know, cultural remains and even human remains inside the cave, we knew well enough to call the scientists in to properly document and explore that.
In Mexico, in the Yucatan Peninsula, the caves, the sinkholes there, they call them cenotes, were the portal to the underworld of Zhibalba to the Mayans.
And every detritus of their lives was thrown into this cenote, as well as ceremonial and sacrificial acts committed around these locations.
And so we find all kinds of things inside these caves.
Well, in many of these caves, the artifacts are actually in the best possible conservation environment they can be in because they're below a layer of water and in water that's anoxic, so there's no oxygen.
So they're preserved and they don't decompose until we bring them out.
So we try to leave artifacts always in place, untouched, undisturbed, until the right scientists and conservators can take charge and make a decision whether they want to bring something out.
Well, you know, even running into it, a jail underwater in a dark cave with, I guess, just your light shining on it and what you find is a skeleton, that's got to be quite a moment.
Well, you know, there's just one place that just sticks in my mind.
I called it the well of time.
And on the surface, imagine you're in this real desert environment with just these hennikin plants that they use to make sisal rope with.
And there's some cattle roaming around, and there's a Mayan guy pumping a metal rusty pump up and down and up and down.
And he's pulling water out of this well to fill troughs for his cattle.
And so we go and we see him and we look in the well and we realize that this is just the doorway to a vast cave below.
And although that surface of the well is only just a few feet across, we can look down and our voice echoes away into the darkness.
So we rappelled down to the water level about 70 feet below.
And it was this vast bell shaped chamber and then water below.
And looking into the clear water, I could see that literally there was like a mountain below the opening, a mountain of stuff that had come one at a time through this hole in the ceiling.
And at the top of the mound were rusted buckets that maybe this guy had dropped throughout his lifetime.
And then a little bit deeper in the water column, we run into these Spanish colonial water-carrying pottery vessels.
And then a little bit deeper, it looks like it's cracked, dry earth, like mud, except that it's underwater, but it still cracks, you know, the way it does when something dries up.
And on that cracked earth were the skulls of like big longhorn cattle and other animals, but they seem to be ritually laid out with other pieces of pottery.
So would you ever, for example, try to get into an aquifer like the one that I envision below me and then sort of map it or figure out where the water comes from?
You know, 20 years ago, water managers and scientists thought we were all just a bunch of adrenaline junkies that didn't have much to contribute to the understanding of water moving through the planet.
But now, you know, cape divers really are an important part of helping get that very real data.
So we swim, you know, through the Earth's sponge, basically.
And where we can't go, sometimes we'll use things like fluorescent dye and put that into places where we think we've got a conduit going in a particular direction and then search for that dye in people's wells and other water supplies to really understand where everything's flowing.
Oh, I mean, there's absolutely no doubt that we're going through, you know, rapid, rapid exponential changes these days.
But, you know, even if we look back in history, we can see changes that occurred, like those Mayan skeletons that we found lying on cracked earth submerged beneath the water inside a well are evidence that Mayans were doing anything that they could, sacrificing their own people to beseech the gods to rain at a time of drought.
But we look back in history and see these other very dramatic climate changes that happen quickly, but now it's happening fast.
Jim, I remember seeing something on TV fascinating, too, about some people who were doing cave diving in Florida about where you are trying to go from, I don't know, to, I guess, from an underwater aquifer and then trying to reach the ocean.
Now, I'm not sure whether that was probably the film that I made, Water's Journey, where we were being tracked from topside and we were underneath golf courses and bowling alleys and in the barbershop.
You know, I sat down a few years ago and looked at all the things that I've been involved in.
And I keep seeing the same lessons over and over again wherever I go.
I'm, you know, learning about climate change.
I'm learning about how our water resources are changing.
And I recognized that I had an opportunity really to be that kind of voice from inside the planet and could use my adventures to teach people about how they're connected with their water resources.
Okay, one more question from me, and then I want to turn you over to the audience.
And it's this.
I lived on Okinawa for a lot of years, island of Okinawa.
And beneath the Ryukyu Islands, there is a virtual civilization to be found.
Sort of an ancient Japanese civilization, I guess, or something.
And there have been a number of dives in that area to look for what used to be there.
Now, how often have you been in a dive and you see that at one time, you know, what you're swimming around or diving around was once obviously above land where people lived?
Yeah, well, you know, that's so interesting because sea levels have been dramatically different on this planet.
I did a project in Bermuda where our job was to do the deepest manned dives ever conducted in the region to find those signs where the sea used to lap up against the shoreline deeper down.
And we discovered these sea level notches at 370 feet beneath the surface of the ocean.
So 370 feet lower than it is today.
So certainly there are unbelievable archaeological remains all over this planet that are now submerged and maybe only to be found with new technologies and satellite imagery and other cool things.
No, I haven't done anything on the Crystal Pyramids.
But I think some of the projects where we've found remains of early inhabitants of a region are really interesting to me.
So in the Yucatan and in Cuba and in the Bahamas, we found some of the early human remains and artifacts with those finds that were really interesting.
On Earth, that is for us Earth dwellers, every now and then we look up in the sky, Jill, and we see what we call a UFO, simply an unidentified flying object.
And I wonder if you have seen ever anything underwater moving quickly that was just not identifiable.
Well, you know, I had one dive in this quite remarkable sinkhole, and it's about 400 feet deep, and there was this tunnel coming in at about 110 feet deep, and it was perhaps the size, a little larger than a basketball.
And coming out of this tunnel was this sort of translucent gelatinous orb, basically.
And then smaller little, like golf ball to baseball size gelatinous colonies just drifting out of this tunnel.
And I've talked with my microbiology friends, and they're like, oh, yeah, that's definitely a bacterial colony of some sort.
And there's some pretty weird life on the microbial scale that you really have to wonder about.
However, I mean, if we think of the way water can travel through the planet, you know, sometimes it's traveling in between grains of sand, and then sometimes it's traveling through spaces that are large enough for me to swim through.
So, you know, springsheds and watersheds cover vast regions, you know, like that Nubian aquifer that's beneath Egypt, Libya, Chad, and Sudan, you know, four entire countries, or the Floridan aquifer underneath northern Florida, Georgia, Alabama.
So these are, you know, vast bodies of water locked up inside the earth.
But it doesn't necessarily mean that we can swim all the way through that.
But the water can, materials can, and life forms can.
unidentified
Can any of these, like the ones you were talking about in Egypt, can any of those wells or anything be connected to Antarctica, possibly?
Or do they see their way through the earth through certain ways like that?
Well, I suppose if you were the tiniest of biological animals that we find inside the caves, they've probably made great journeys from these deep smoking ocean vents all the way into like a limestone cave in Bermuda because we have animals in limestone caves in Bermuda that are like young caves, but somehow these very ancient animals are living in these water-filled caves.
Like, how did they get there?
They had to have found their way through the matrix of the earth.
So maybe I can't swim there, but other things are making that journey.
And so I think that our entire earth is really a ball of life, but it's life forms that we may not know about or understand yet.
No, and to go with it, the sun is only 3,000 miles above the earth.
But, you know, when I say they believe this, Jill, I mean with almost a religious fervor they believe this.
So there you have it.
Is there anything that in your dives, in your travels, confirms for you beyond any shadow of a doubt or need for a debate that the earth is indeed basically a ball?
Yeah, so oftentimes when we're in what we call the cavern zone, so just in the doorway of a cave, yeah, we can certainly see the light of the entrance.
But, you know, once you're a little ways in, it's complete blackness.
Now, some caves have multiple entrances, so we may actually swim for great distances and then come to another entrance.
So, yeah, in Antarctica, we used cislunar Mark V rebreathers.
And that gave us, you know, the long times as well as a bit of an additional warmth for diving in that really cold water because the rebreathers themselves create a little bit of heat in the chemical reaction of the scrubbing process.
I have about 7,000 dives.
I honestly haven't tallied the total hours, so I'm not sure I could give you that number.
And working also with a National Geographic Innovation fellow who's a real specialist in 3D imaging as well as 360 camera work.
So I'm quite excited to be doing some more work with him as well.
You know, it's amazing.
Today, we can find an artifact in a cave and shoot pictures that can be all put together with software to create a really accurate 3D model that we can even print.
So we could print a skull and send it to a scientist to look at.
Well, Atlantida Cave, so it's inside the Monte Corona volcano in Lanzarote in the Canary Islands.
And the entrance, the dry entrance to the cave is actually a big show cave.
So people go there to walk inside the cave.
There's a big dining area.
There's a concert hall within the natural cave.
And then the funny thing is, is that we actually have to walk through this ballroom area, climb over a little fence, and then we're caving down this boulder slope to get to the water where the lava tube continues and plunges beneath the surface of the ocean, beneath the floor of the ocean.
And there's this quite remarkable thing inside this cave about a mile inside these Tunnels and they're huge, black, dark, vast tunnels that we swim through.
But suddenly we arrive at this mountain of snow-white sand, and it's about 80 feet high from floor to ceiling, just like the bottom of an hourglass, basically.
And this white sand has actually fallen perhaps a single grain at a time from a hole in the ceiling that's beneath the seafloor, basically.
So one drop of sand at a time is coming through the ceiling and creating this 80-foot-high mountain like an hourglass.
And we were pushing core samples into this to pull out sand from sand mountain and discovered numerous new species that hadn't been recorded before.
It's, you know, it's a bit of a role reversal in our life where he has to be, you know, home maintaining the business while I'm off doing these dangerous, crazy things.
And I have to promise to him that each decision I make, I think about him, you know, and I think about what's best for both of us.
I mean, he not only has to face the dangers that I have to confront underwater, but sometimes, you know, the dangers in hostile regions that I go to as well.
Yeah, it's not an easy life, but that's why I say I've hit the jackpot because he really understands that this is what makes me whole, and you just can't stuff a butterfly into a jar and expect it to live.
That's right.
And so it's with love and respect that he tolerates and embraces and supports everything that I do.
So we had a project in the Yucatan where our goal was to use these tethered small sort of robots to send them down to have a first look.
And then if things looked interesting, then we would follow with a dive team.
But it turns out that when something is tethered and you're trying to drive it topside with a joystick, you just don't have that same perception that the human brain does of developing that model of what's around you.
So on that project, I spent more time actually rescuing the little drone because he gets stuck.
But, you know, we're at a really interesting time in technology that artificial intelligence is going to change everything.
So Dr. Bill Stone's work with creating autonomous, artificially intelligent, you know, swimming robots, basically, we can now send these into a cave environment.
They can go down, map in three dimensions.
They can chase the flow.
They can pick up life forms.
They can learn all about their environment and then come back as the fuel is running out.
You know, at this point in time, I think a lot of people think that artificial intelligence is going to exist in your, you know, the Roomba skirting around on the floor or this robot that I just described swimming, you know, underwater.
But I don't think that's how it's all going to pan out.
I think that technology and humanity will eventually morph in some way.
You know, your personal computer or your cell phone will be a part of your body.
And so well, it's artificial intelligence.
So, yeah, I think that we're going to co-evolve really with technology.
Well, you know, that would be nice if we co-evolve.
A lot of people, including a lot of very smart scientists and business moguls, think that what's going to happen, Jill, is that this singularity is going to result in the takeover.
That machines, when they become AI, will realize that we are an inefficient, warlike species that is not helping the planet at all.
And the only logical conclusion, you follow me, right?
But the real question is, so in all these dives, in all these fantastic places all over the world, what's your most profound spiritual experience that you've ever had while you're diving?
Where you felt like, oh my God, there's underwater angels around me.
There's underwater God, whatever that means.
And it's just, wow, what a transformative experience.
You know, very recently, I had a dive that was just like you described.
So I was in the Azores and on top of the volcanic seamount offshore from the island of Santa Maria.
And we were jumping in the water with the promise to swim with these giant mobilas, these giant devil rays.
And I got down there with my camera and this unbelievable train of 40 devil rays lined up and just came in swooping arcs before me closer and closer and closer until one by one they would hover over me until I exhaled and I think my exhaled breath would hit the bottom of this devil ray and it was like I was tickling it.
It would kind of shiver and move along and the next one would move in.
And that went on for like 90 minutes.
I was just blown away with this sort of communion I was having with these animals.
Well, you know, I've done a lot of firsts for women, for sure.
You know, my dives in Waculla Springs with the USD caving team sort of took me further into deep caves than any woman had been before and, you know, pretty much in the top 10 of distances that any man had done at the time.
But cave diving is not really competitive.
You know, exploration is sort of, I guess, a more pure form of expression.
And it's really the scientific objectives that are so much more important to me.
Like, I'm not really interested in being the deepest or anything like that.
I'd rather have these profound experiences and connect with science and understanding.
I wanted to ask if you have known of the Dosh Ojos down in the Yucatan.
They were exploring that many years ago when we were down there, and we got to cave dive it with one of the divers, and it was spectacular.
But we didn't go in very far.
It was my first cave dive, and it was just gorgeous.
And we'd already been in the Senoca and were fascinated by that.
So he said, if you're that interested and, you know, we're experienced divers, he said he'd take us through, and he did.
It was really – And whoever could map out the largest distance and connect the two would prove that they were the longest, I think the longest cave system at that time that had ever been explored.
But they needed to gather the other one.
So whoever could do it first to break through would grab the other one's distance.
Yeah, I was involved in that exploration of Dosohos in the mid to late 90s.
And at the time, we were sort of the competing team with the cave next door, which was called Nahoch.
And it was, yeah, the bigger cave always swallows up the smaller cave when they meet.
And we were trying to connect them.
Since that time, so much exploration has happened in that part of the Yucatan that many of the largest cave systems have all been connected, you know, literally hundreds of miles of passages.
In fact, so a cenote, a sinkhole, a blue hole, those are actually the same geologic formation.
So you can imagine kind of a big hourglass shape that occurs in the Earth, and that's from a ceiling that's collapsed down inward on a vast underground chamber.