What Blue Holes Have to Say About Climate Change | Years of Living Dangerously

We're getting everything ready aboard this ship, here the, uh, Alucha research vessel. What we've got on board Alusia is we've got two subs; both subs are TH000 M rated. We probably, on board the ship, do the most thousand M diving in the world at this moment in time. We are just about to enter the rim of the Blue Hole now.

Roger, this is a big moment in our trip. We're just arriving at the Blue Hole. This Blue Hole is about 300 M across and it's about 90 M deep. We're going along and mapping the sea bottom with a 90° beam underneath the ship. You can then modify that to make a beautiful picture of the sea bottom.

So what these guys are doing is they're taking core samples of this sediment in the bottom of these blue holes. The idea is to learn when the hurricanes have occurred in the past, and they can go back almost several thousand years if they get down low enough. One, two, three, and when they cut them open, they're looking at layers of sediment just as a geologist on land might look on a mountainside at layers of Earth that way.

So, this episode is about climate disruption in the sense of storms, hurricanes, namely. I'm from Louisiana; I know a lot about hurricanes. I got involved because this is a story that needs to be told. Climate change is real; it's man-made, and as a result of that, we are heating our oceans to a place where storms are going to be more frequent. And that spells trouble for all of us.

There's nowhere else in the world that holds such high-resolution records of these storm event beds. So being able to look at these archives into the past truly gives us a great understanding about how we can expect these storms to be changing as we move to a warmer climate with a higher sea level.

This particular expedition is a dream come true. We're basically taking these submarines down into these giant blue holes and studying them. When they bring that thing down and they gently rest it on the sea floor, you realize I'm literally 300 ft below the surface of the water. What is down there is the key to our history, and therefore, it's the key to our future.