Back in September of 2021, scientists from the Colegio de la Frontera Sur were poking around in the bay of Chetumal in the western Caribbean Sea on the southern coast of the Yucatán Peninsula. They found something unexpected, but certainly not unwanted: the second-deepest blue hole on the planet.
At just a hair under 900 feet deep, the enormous hole, fittingly named Taam ja’ (meaning “deep water” in the Mayan language), is a scientific wonder. Blue holes can be found in a variety of places — China’s Dragon Hole, Dean’s Blue Hole in the Bahamas, and of course the Great Blue Hole in Belize to name a few — and they were created during past ice ages when the sea level was a heck of a lot lower than it is now. Erosion from rain and chemical erosion (when “water, oxygen, carbon dioxide, and other chemical substances react with rock to change its composition”) ate away at the rock to form vertical shafts. Then, when the seas rose, those holes filled in, creating some of the most interesting formations on our planet.
They’re called blue holes because of the contrast between the darker blue waters way down and the lighter, shallower part near the surface. The water circulation is generally pretty bad, so they’re not great at supporting sea life, but bacteria tends to thrive in them.
The researchers who discovered Taam ja’ recently released a study on their findings. Using Water sampling, eco-sounding machines, and SCUBA gear, they think that it has a staggering large surface area of 147,357 square feet. It’s just a hair shy of the deepest blue hole on Earth, which is in Sansha Yongle, China. That one is 984 feet deep, but Taam ja’ is deeper than the world’s most famous blue hole, the Great Blue Hole. That one comes in at 410 feet in depth.
Taam ja’ was discovered after local fisherman were talking about it. “Knowledge provided by fishermen coupled with scientific research on karstic formations prompted us to explore the geomorphometric and physicochemical features of a submerged blue hole in the large tropical estuary of Chetumal Bay in the southeastern coast of the Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico,” the study’s authors wrote. “This study revealed a previously unknown maximum water depth for the Taam ja’ Blue Hole, as it is now named, of 274.4 meters below sea level (mbsl), making it the second deepest known blue hole in the world.”
While scientists are still in the process of exposing the secrets of Taam ja’, it’s a sure bet they’re going to find something interesting down there.
