A huge hole opened up in the ocean and it’s hiding a terrifying truth

The Great Blue Hole off the coast of Belize is one of the world’s most peculiar features and scientists have just made a terrifying prediction about the world's future because of it.

Measuring 300 metres (984 feet) across and around 125 metres (410 feet) deep, it formed at the end of the last Ice Age when rising seawater flooded a series of massive caverns. The Great Blue hole lies around 60 miles off the coast of Belize City and forms part of the Belize Barrier Reef, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The caves that were flooded are believed to have been formed some 153,000 years ago and completely submerged about 15,000 years ago. Giant stalactites, structures of rock formations that hang from the roof of a cave like an icicle, show they once existed above water.

Today, the Great Blue Hole has become a tourist attraction. Plus, several shark species including Caribbean reef sharks, nurse sharks, hammerheads, bull sharks, and black tip sharks call it home.

The Great Blue Hole off the coast of Belizeen.m.wikipedia.org

But now the massive marine sinkhole has unearthed a trend that is concerning experts. Scientists from Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, extracted a 98ft (30m) sediment core from the bottom in 2022 after transporting a drilling platform to the massive hole.

They examined the core, consisting of hundreds of layers of coarse particles that were carried over from the nearby atoll reef by storm surges and waves. The core has given experts an unprecedented archive of storms over the last 5,700 years. The research team also consisted of scientists from Cologne, Göttingen, Hamburg, and Bern.

Layers of sediment examined showed that over the past six millennia, there have been between four and 16 tropical storms pass over the hole on average per 100 years.

However, the frequency and intensity of the storms increased steadily, and grew significantly over the past two decades.

Researchers have linked the recent, concerning uptick to climate change, while the steady rise was linked to natural climatic shifts. They concluded that there had been 574 storm events over the past 5,700 years.

Based on predictions as a result of the increasing rate, there could be up to 45 tropical storms and hurricanes in the Caribbean by the end of the 21st century, a massive number compared to the overall average of 16 every 100 years for the past six millennia.

“Predictions of tropical cyclone frequencies are hampered by insufficient knowledge of their natural variability in the past,” the research team explained.

“A 30m-long sediment core from the Great Blue Hole, a marine sinkhole offshore Belize, provides the longest available, continuous, and annually resolved tropical cyclone frequency record.

“A 21st-century extrapolation suggests an unprecedented increase in tropical cyclone frequency, attributable to the Industrial Age warming.”

The findings were published in the journal Science Advances.

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