Divers Bringing Light To Cave's Dark Mystery

A team of the world's foremost cave divers are venturing into the granddaddy of Florida's underwater caves, discovering clues about Florida's geologic evolution and testing cutting-edge exploration technology.

Halfway through an 11-week expedition at the Wakulla Springs cave in North Florida, the divers are in the thick of an adventure that leaps beyond any of the Tarzan movies filmed here a half-century ago.

For decades Wakulla has been a mystery, but with each exploratory dive a few of the cave's secrets are beginning to surface.

Until last month, divers thought the cave stretched out like a gargantuan throat from its underwater mouth -- a long, watery tunnel. After several weeks of penetrating a half-mile beyond the cave's mouth, divers have found a vast limestone labyrinth that forks off in at least three directions. Each prong of the fork has offshoots heading into even more uncharted territory.

Underwater Caves of New Caledonia Harbor an Eerie World for the Adventurous

Human skulls hang from the entrances, and footsteps are said to disappear as if by magic outside New Caledonia's mysterious limestone caves.

Indigenous Kanak tribesmen on the South Pacific islands stay well away from the water-filled caverns where the remains of ancestral warlords have been laid to rest in a world said to be peopled by the age-old spirits of the land.

But for tourists, scuba-divers and what the French call "speleonauts"-deep water-diving speleologists-the caves tucked away in the jungles of the sun-baked French islands provide sport and discovery.

On a narrow dirt track fringed by towering ferns, a group of divers, flippers in hand and tanks belted on backs, move toward a gap in the greenery.

The mouth of a cave opens onto a vast cathedral-like chamber where thick columns of lace-edged stalactites and stalagmites, millions of years old, frame a gateway to an underwater lake.

60 Feet Underground
With a plop, the five wet-suited divers disappear below the still, black waters of this eerily silent world about 60 feet under the ground.

Half an hour later, the explorers from Australia resurface ecstatic from their first cave-dive into one of the few fresh water cave-diving sites in the world.