Mapping Water's Journey: Connecting the Aquifer with Life Above Ground

By Peter Lane Taylor
Reporting From High Springs, Florida

Exploration—the act of looking for something we might never find-is an interesting concept these days. With virtually every corner of the globe known, mapped, and in one way or another, harnessed for human use, the whole idea of just looking seems to go against everything that we've learned about getting a leg up. Why search for something in the first place if there's no guarantee that we'll profit from the finding?

For people like Wes and his team of world class cave divers, however, the notion that exploration has gone out of style is much more than just a personal insult. In terms of the uncharted underwater wilderness here in north Florida, it's also down right frightening. It implies we're willing to accept the world as it's been passed down to us, and more importantly, that there's nothing we can learn about water's journey that can help to restore Florida's springs to their once pristine state.

“People think they're getting
rid of their garbage by dumping
it in the sinkhole,
but what they don't realize
is that they're putting it
right into their drinking water.”
—Wes Skiles

Today, the Karst cave exploration team led by Jill Heinerth and biologist Tom Morris intends to turn these assumptions upside down by proving that modern day exploration still has one ace left to play-namely, that of education. By connecting the uncharted underwater conduits between two sinkholes, Wes and his team are attempting to illustrate that the flow of groundwater here is directly affected by the human activities that take place above it.

In theory, the plan for Jill and Tom's dive is a simple one: drop in at one sinkhole, scoot west-southwest at 210 feet and pop up at the second sinkhole to the fresh air of a sunny afternoon. In practice, however, nothing about cave diving is simple. Unlike other "extreme" recreations like high altitude mountaineering or open ocean sailing, the kind of deep penetration cave diving required to explore Florida's aquifer offers little margin for error.

"The risks are pretty simple once you're down there," Wes explains as Jill and Tom suit up for their dive, "If something goes wrong, you die."

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