Exploring Wakulla Springs: One Small Step for Inner Space

By Peter Lane Taylor
Reporting From Wakulla Springs, Florida

Springs are a lot like people. Once you've spent enough time with them, you discover that no two are alike; each has its own character and spirit as well as good days and bad days. Springs also have their shining stars, where evolution seems to have spent a bit more time making sure it got everything right. In north Florida, that star is Wakulla Springs.

"Wakulla is the Mecca of springs and underwater caves," diver and film producer Jill Heinerth tells me. "Movies, world-record cave dives, archeological discoveries, you name it—Wakulla is where it all happened first."

“Wakulla Springs is the Mount Everest of underwater caves.
It is the largest single-source freshwater spring in the world.”

Today, on the coldest morning of the year so far, our team of online explorers is here with David Struhs*, the Secretary of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, and two dozen local school students from the Cornerstone Learning Community and the Florida A&M University Developmental Research Center to witness yet another Wakulla first: an experimental cave dive by Jill, her husband Paul, and Shannon Caraccia to test radio tracking and voice communication technology, invented by electrical engineer Brian Pease, that will allow surface teams to map the underwater journey of cave explorers in real time.

"What we're doing here today," Jill explains as she assembles her equipment for the dive, "is giving cave divers the equivalent of mission control and a way to communicate through hundreds of feet of rock to the surface. If this technology works, we'll change the face of cave exploration forever."

Wes and Jill have chosen Wakulla to test their new technology for the simple reason that if it works in Wakulla, it'll work anywhere. Wakulla Springs is the Mount Everest of underwater caves. It is the largest single-source freshwater spring in the world, flowing at its peak at over fifteen-million gallons of water an hour and nourishing a great diversity of plant and animal life. Wakulla's inner geology is no less staggering: thousands of feet within the main conduit draining the aquifer, over three-hundred feet underwater, cave divers have found caverns and passages large enough to host a football game.

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*This story was first published in 2002. David Struhs is the former secretary of the Department of Environmental Education.