December 19, 2019 • 51 mins
There are extreme sports and then there is cave diving, the most extreme activity a person can engage in without leaving Earth. Cave divers stay underwater swimming miles into – that’s right – caves, where no human has ever been before. It’s pretty cool.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody, it's me Josh and there's Chuck over there,
and we just wanted to drop in to tell you
we're going on tour and you should come see us.
That's right. We are going to be in Seattle. I
think that show is close to sold out, so you
can always poke around for tickets. Sometimes they become available,
why not? And uh, what date is that? That is Thursday, January,
(00:20):
that's right. And then we're taking a ticket Friday after relax,
that's what we do. And then we're going to San
Francisco Sketch Fest on Saturday. That's right. We're going to
be there on January tenth of the Castro Theater. And
if you want to see us, well, then go to
s Y s K live dot com or the s
F Sketch Fest dot com website and you can get
(00:41):
tickets to come see us on Saturday January, that's right.
And if you're still around on Sunday the nineteenth, then
you want to come see Movie Crush live, you can
do that as well. It will be intimate and fun.
Nice get intimate with Chuck. Everybody. We'll see in January.
Welcome to Steff. You should know a production of I
Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
(01:10):
I'm Josh Clark, Nurse Charles W. Danger is his middle name,
even though it begins with W. Bryant. And there's Jerry
Jerome Roll. We're gonna stick with Jerome, Okay, it's a
good cave diver's name. Yeah, I have just my regular
name because I would never in a million years cave dive.
(01:32):
But I never even scuba dived. Fat I have. Yeah,
I believe that open water stuff. I got really um
like I guess csick right afterwards two and I was
convinced that it had to do with the arrows breathing.
I was like, I'm done, which sticks because it was
really cool. Breathing underwater is one of the neatest experiences
(01:54):
you will ever have. It's really cool, but not not
snorkel like you're totally you're under water and you're breathing,
even as it's pool. It doesn't matter. Just take like
a scuba lesson once and you'll you'll there, you go,
You're done. I have dreams where I can breathe underwater
a lot, but it's not like, hey, I'm aquaman and
(02:14):
I'm just breathing like a fish or something. It's that
I figured out how to very slowly draw in air,
very carefully from the water around me. It's it's really
a strange dream, but I have it a lot. It's
pretty cool. Yeah, I'm not sure what it means. I
don't either. I can't even begin to guess. But what's
(02:36):
more boring than talking about someone's dreams? They say that
nothing is more boring than that. Yeah, I thought that
was a pretty interesting one though. If you're going to
talk about your dream, that's a good one to go with. Um,
we're not talking about your dreams today though, Chuck. No,
we're talking about cave diving, right, which is not a dream. Again,
I'm with you. I don't think it's not for me.
Like I couldn't even go like regular cavings so lunking,
(03:00):
which I did the one time, right, I can't remember.
Did you enjoy it? I did? It was a butt
kicker physically, very hard work. But I remember describing the
pancake thing that I went through where the you know,
I was laying on my back squirming through in the
in the rock face was three inches above my body
(03:20):
and face and you could you're getting nervous now I
don't even like hearing about it. Yeah, that was a
little weird, and I'm not even a claustrophobic guy, but
I was like, this is you know, you could die
in here. I've read about a poor guy, maybe the
poorest of all time, well one of them, who was
caving with his family, friends and family and got stuck
(03:44):
and ended up dying. His his like, they could get
to him, they could move his foot, they could touch
his leg legs, but he was just so stuck that
they just couldn't do anything for him, and so they
decided to go home. He died. No, they were there
the whole time, but he over like I think the
course of twenty four hours. He he just died the
slow she's terrifying death. So they couldn't They could reach
(04:07):
his foot, but not his mouth, clearly, yes, to give him,
you know, nutrients. They tried to give him stuff through
an ivy. I think they tried to give him a
sedative and it kept falling out of his leg, so
they couldn't even do that. Oh gosh, it was bad.
It's hard to even here about. I know, man, but
this is cave diving, which is even more dangerous than caving. Yeah,
(04:29):
and there's a couple of a few types of diving.
There's the open water diving that you were talking about,
there's cavern diving. An open water diving just means, if
you know, if you get in trouble, go up and
you'll reach the surface. You're not gonna get hit in
the head by a cave ceiling or pinned down through crevasse. No.
(04:50):
Cavern diving is a little different in that you're in
a cavern, but you should be able to see sunlight
above you and if you go up you can get
your head out. Eventually you're from what I saw, the
definition is your no more than seventy ft deep and
you're within a hundred and thirty linear feet of the
cave mouth or more specifically, your surroundings are illuminated by daylight.
(05:15):
That's that's really what separates cavern diving from cave diving.
It's kind of like remember a bio speleology episode, So
this would be the twilight zone between the dark zone
and the light zone. That that would be kind of
cavern diving diving in the twilight zone. Right. Then you
get to cave diving, and that is serious business. This
is not. Uh, what's considered recreational diving? Uh, this is
(05:41):
going deep and dark? Yeah with David re going deep
with David Rees, I haven't spoken to recent a while.
I love that guy. Oh, he's a great guy. So
this is a technical diving. Can give another definition of deep.
Wasn't on that Reefe joke, going deep wasn't good enough.
(06:04):
Cave diving is diving with an overhead environment, so that
separates it from open water environment. If you goes and
panic and swim straight up, you're gonna bonk your head. Yeah,
you might have gone to under foot um there and
you have no direct vertical access to open air surface
or light. Yeah, this is extremely important. Bas horror, a nightmare,
(06:30):
a living nightmare that you're doing on purpose that you've
paid it a lot of money to equip yourself for. Um.
The light thing is a really big one too. Like,
here's the thing. It's really easy because you're thinking that
this is cave diving and the word caves in there
and we're talking about caves, but it's scuba diving really,
but it's scuba diving inside a cave. This is a
(06:50):
really important thing to not lose sight of. It's a cave.
It's deep in the bowels of the earth. Yes, there
are there's no light. There's only light is the light
that you have and you're moving through it underwater. This
is cave diving. I'm in awe of people who do this,
and I could watch videos of it all day long. Yeah,
(07:11):
it's very cool to see. Um, it's like scuba plus
as far as the creep factor goes. I read one
article about a guy who is a cave diving researcher.
And as we'll see, you know, there's scientific discoveries that
have been made in these caves because just like the
the deep dry caves, the things that live in there
(07:32):
are remarkable. Um. And this guy was sixty nine years
old and still going strong and said his family, you know,
always worries about him, but he super experience, knows what
he's doing. But it's still fraught with danger. I do
have a few death stats if you want. I read
a scientific presentation called thirty years of American cave diving Fatalities.
(07:56):
Two thou you got the same one? Huh. This is
by the divers A Network. A hundred and sixty one
divers had died over that. Uh. What how long was
that thirty year period. Uh, sixty seven of them were trained,
eighty seven were untrained, which is crazy, Like, I don't
know what they're doing down there to beginner with a
fool Yeah, if you just take up cave diving for
(08:18):
the first time, but like, yeah, exactly, because sixty seven
trained cave divers perished. Yeah, and how chuck? How what
was the vast majority? Most common cause was aphixia due
to drowning preceded by running out of breathing gas, usually
after getting lost because of a loss of visibility caused
by suspended silt. And that's where most of these are
(08:42):
in Florida, And that's where I learned about the silt
out also from the article you sent about the um
the cave rescue in Thailand in Thailand, which was apparently
very silty. And a silt out is when so much
silt gets kicked up that it just blacks out even
with your light source. Yeah. The guy that was in that,
I think it was an article in Atlantic um with
(09:05):
a guy and it was named Robert Layard. I think
he's a cave diving expert. And he said, you can
put your light up to your mask and you can
kind of see your light, but that's it, and you're
in a cave, so you don't know where to go.
Even feeling your way around is not going to help you. Um.
And the problem with a silt out is they can
last for so long in a bad a bad case
(09:26):
of a silt out, that you will run out of
air before the silt settles enough for you to see through,
So it's a bad jam. Well. And then this that
you probably read the same interviews, but there's a panic
is what this guy said is what usually happens even
with an experienced diver, because there's no escape, there's no
quick way out, and things tend to have a domino effect.
(09:49):
So if you're in a silt out, like you said,
it's you try and stay as still as possible, and
it's still maybe not gonna work. You're getting nervous, the
kind of fidgety now that you've pointed out it's panic
inducing just to think about it, Like you have to
remain perfectly still in the total darkness, and that might
(10:10):
not even be good enough to let that salt stuttle
settle I I saw um and even a bigger estimate
of the number of deaths from cave diving. From the
National Speleological Society's cave Diving section, they estimated more than
four deaths in the history of cave diving, but they
said in the world, okay, that the other one is
(10:34):
just o was it just America? Okay. They placed a
lot of them towards the beginning of cave diving, which
took which started in the fifties or sixties. Hey, I
wonder what's in their stage? Yeah, which is crazy because
scuba diving started in about the fifties. So within a
little while of somebody inventing scuba diving, some people were like, oh,
let's go into caves with this stuff. And they started dying.
(10:55):
And so they pointed out like these people didn't give
their lives in vain. Each day was a lesson learned
for everyone else who who um, you know, was yet
to come. But a lot of people died early on,
and it's gotten much. They are far fewer deaths from
cave diving. But it's like you said, there there typically
are cave diving experts who are dying because they're pushing
(11:17):
themselves further and further. If you have you know, no
one's cave died before every cave you dive into is
a new exploration and this is a huge driver for
people who cave died. This is why they do it.
They're seeing something that no other human on Earth in
most cases, has ever seen in the history of humanity.
They're the first human to be in this place. Um,
(11:39):
there's lots of stuff to discover for when humans were there,
but now it's flooded. Um, there's there's just a lot
of discovery. But as it's been going on for decades now,
every time somebody discovers a new thing, that's one thing
that that is not left to be discovered by everybody else.
So they're pushing themselves further and further. When you cave dive,
(12:01):
you might be a hundred feet under sea level, but
you might be scuba diving for miles down through a
cave system downward necessarily, yeah, horizontal miles. Um, you know,
round trip for this this cave dive, which is nuts,
but that's that's what they do. Yeah. I don't even
(12:22):
remember where I was going with that. I started to
get panicked again. Have you seen Once upon a Time
in Hollywood? Yeah, you know the scene with Brad Pitt
on the boat in his in that sixty scuba gear.
It's just so cool looking at Before we say this,
I come from the future to warn us in the
past that we should add spoiler alert here. That was that. Uh,
it's like when they used to call him skin divers. Yes,
(12:45):
do you think he killed his wife? Uh? Well, I
think that's what you were led to believe. Whether I
felt like it was up in the air well a
little bit. Uh. Also could have been an accident because
he was clearly had that spear gun resting on his
knee pointing at her right. Um. Yeah, The question is
did his neurons fire and make his finger move right? Okay,
(13:08):
so he took care of the spoiler that was like
five minutes ago, I know. And now we're back to
cave diving and we should talk a little bit about equipment.
This A lot of this came from one of our
old House Stuff Works colleagues from the website, our old
buddy John Fuller, who looks like mc estro. Like he's
been mentioned twice. Then he's the tie that binds the
(13:29):
Estra episode and the cave diving episode. Yeah, and some
of this equipment thing isn't the most exciting stuff in
the world. But we should talk about it anyway. I
found it frankly arousing. You got your mask, uh, and
this is something I didn't know. Um. They used sort
of simple black masks because it absorbs light. Yeah, um,
(13:50):
which makes sense. Yeah, because you're using your own light source,
so it can get pretty bright. I saw a flashlight
from under water kinetics. Maybe it's like fifteen thousand lumens
some ridiculous amount of lumens, a lot of lumens um.
And yeah, if you have that stuff bouncing all over
(14:12):
the place, you don't want your light, your your you know,
gold glitter, diamond dusted mask, reflecting it in your eyes
cuts down invisibility. But I take issue with Fuller saying
that they favorite simple masks because these guys do like
the full face like be a mask. Yeah, not the
bread pitt skin diver sixties mask, which I loved. Yeah,
(14:35):
I think I think some of them might. But I
also saw plenty of them have like you know, I'm
trying to think of what to call it, but just
a really cool full face mask. Yeah. It looks like
something that you could dive in a cave in or
go to outer space in. Basically. Yeah. So then you've
got your fins again, black rubber fins. But the difference
(14:57):
here and uh that I gather from this and open
water because you don't want those super long, super bindy
fins because you're trying to not kick up silt, so
you want those shorter, stiffer fins. Uh. And when you're
down there swimming around, you're using little, short, controlled kicks. Yeah, no,
big sweeping leg movements. No, it's a huge, huge difference
(15:19):
between cave diving and open water diving. Open witer diving,
your legs are extended out behind you and you're fluttering
those um, those fins up and down and you're propelling
yourself forward. In In cave diving, you're bent. Your legs
are bent at the knees, so your feet are up
slightly above you, and mostly you're making frog kicks, which
(15:40):
are all in the ankle, and you're just kind of
waddling yourself along with these little kicks. You see what
I'm saying. I love for twelve years you've been doing
little physical gestures of me like anyone else in the
world could see them. Well, who am I talking to?
But you know that's the whole point. So the frog
look chuck like this is what they do little frog kicks.
(16:00):
But in doing that that you cut down on the
potential of um coming in contact with the rest of
the cave. There's a couple of reasons why you want
to do that. One, you want to preserve the cave.
If you break off a stalactite, stalactite coming from the
ceiling um, that's a that's nature's work that you just
messed with. You don't want to do that, bro. And
(16:21):
then secondly, a lot of caves, pretty much all of
them have that silt sediment on the bottom. If you
kick it up, you've got a silt out, So you
you want to really be careful what kind of um
movement you're making with your fins, and then just how
big your fins are and how flexible they are. And
then one other thing about that too. You also want
(16:43):
to maintain basically perfect buoyancy where you're completely neutrally buoyant
relative to the top and the bottom of the cave. Yeah,
what do they call the movement dragon float, pulling, glide
glide float. Yeah, it's sort of the same you do
when you recover a body. Well, a lot of this
(17:04):
is body recovery very sadly. Um, well, not a lot
of it, but part of search and rescue can very
much involve going deep and getting very swollen, water logged bodies.
But yeah, you pull yourself along with your hand, like
in a little groove by the rock and then just
let yourself glide. It seems very relaxing considering you're doing
the most horrifying thing on the planet. Yeah, so you
(17:26):
might do that even instead of kicking, depending on where
the space is, how tight it is that kind of thing. Also,
it depends on how um uh solid the surroundings are,
like you wouldn't do that or anything like that. Um
And then also apparently you only do that when you
have a current. There's one thing we should say, there's
two kinds of cave diving, spring diving and sump diving.
(17:51):
And in spring diving that's where you see like the
pictures in like National Geographic magazine where it's just this
beautiful cave and there's just two people in scooba gear
floating in the middle of it. That's a spring fed
cave where you've got water moving through it keeping it
very clear because there's no way for sediment to settle
(18:11):
because the currents moving to to um quickly and you
use that current to pull and glide. That looks like
something has a little bit more appeal. Yeah, but I
mean it's just as dangerous as anything else. Like you said,
most of the people who die in cave diving die
in Florida, And that's what they're doing, is diving in
those springs U And the other time the sump kind
(18:32):
those are a little more scary to me. That's a
cave system where if you imagine like kind of like
a zigzag like Charlie Brown's shirt, say, that's the cave system.
The inside of the cave, half of the bottom half
is covered with water that you have to scooba through,
but you also have to climb over through dry parts
(18:53):
in air and then get down to the to the water. Again.
That's the sump kind of that's super sediment and you
really got to know what you're are doing there. That's
the most dangerous kind by far. Uh. You have your
suit that you're wearing, and you can wear a wet suit,
standard wet suit or a dry suit. These are not cheap.
They cost, you know, several thousand dollars per a good one.
(19:14):
All this equipment is not cheap. Uh, So it's not
the kind of thing that you just sort of decided
to try out, right, So you have to be wealthy
and totally out of your mind to cave die. Dry
suits are sealed off, so you know, if you've ever
put on a wet suit, part of the process is
getting in that cold water and letting it fill up
your wet suit, which will warm it up. That's the
(19:36):
idea eventually, is that water warms. But that process isn't fun.
Getting in and out of a wet suit isn't fun neither,
to be honest. And it's not that flouttering. No gotuits
to it, you know. Uh, we had to wear them
when we scoop it up with the whales, the whale sharks.
It seems like a hundred years ago. It was easily
a hundred years ago. The dry suits seal off that water,
(19:58):
so you are dry. That's why they call it a
dry suit. Your body doesn't get wet um. And the
cool thing here is that you can layer up some clothing,
uh and then put on this suit because you can
stay warmer. It's a much more pleasant imaging silkies or something. Yeah.
I love the silkies. Uh. And then John makes a
good point. You want to you want to have like
(20:19):
extras of just about everything. Like you don't go down
there with a flashlight. I'd have eight flashlights strapped to
every single lamb on my body, like I'm sure they
carry like an extra. I would have a bunch of
extra light. Yeah, you get your little knife if you
get snagged, you cut things. I would have nine knives,
(20:39):
eight flashlights. Well, you do want a redundant amount of stuff,
like you were saying, like you just because if something
goes wrong down there, you are toast unless you can
slowly and deliberately get yourself back to the surface of
the ocean. That's right, that's so yeah. But the other
thing you want to do too is you're in very
(21:00):
cramp quarters here, so everything has to be strapped down
pretty closely to your body or in like a pocket,
because you can't have any stuff hanging down because you'll
get tangled up. I don't want to get tangled up
down there. But I know this is kind of amateur
hour stuff because we're not a good breaking point. But
we should probably take a nab break right here. No,
I think it's a great time and we'll talk about
(21:21):
how you breathe down there right after this sk that's
what SKO you should know. Sorry, everyone, I'm so sorry.
(21:48):
So you need to breathe down there. Everyone has seen
a scuba tank, um, but it's a little bit different.
It's quite a bit different in fact than open water diving. Um.
You're going to need uh, different things to go that deep,
different kinds of air mixtures. Uh. And there are a
(22:08):
few different kinds that you can use. But we should
probably talk a little bit about the bins and what
happens to your body. I know we covered the bens
in uh the which one was it the what was
the old time diving suit called diving bell? Was it
diving bell? I think we covered the bens. We must have,
probably so, yeah, because we've never done a scuba episode.
(22:30):
So John from his original House of Works article makes
a very great point about pressure and talks about soda
bottles and obviously if you shake up a soda bottle
and then open it really quick, it's going to go everywhere.
Or if you're Josh and you've never in your life
apparently opened a tonic bottle, I thought it was tonic?
Was probably both really, yeah, you've got to open those
(22:52):
very very slowly every time, no matter if it's shaken
or not. I don't think any of those are my fault.
But um like every backstage we've ever been to has
tonic and soda on the floor. If there, I'm cursed
with that. But if you do shake up a soda
bottle in the difference between opening it quickly and very
very slowly is can be related to how the human
(23:14):
body reacts under the pressure of that water. Yeah, so
in this case, when you're scuba diving, opening the cap
is analogous to slowly making your way back up to
the surface at a graduated set of time. They're both
decompression basically, is what it is. And so you could
have rapid decompression where your soda goes everywhere, or your
(23:35):
blood vessels burst, or you can follow these timetables to
um to get the nitrogen bubbles out of your blood.
And like you're saying, that's a big it's a big
problem with scuba diving, especially if you're down below a
hundred feet UM for an extended period of time, the
nitrogen um can really build up in your blood, which
(23:56):
can give you the bends you can also suffer from
nitrogen narcosis, which is bad news where you apparently feel
like you're drunk because of your because you're intoxicated on nitrogen. Yeah,
the same thing can happen with oxygen. Yeah, Um, it's different,
but you can have oxygen what's it called oxygen toxicity? Right,
So there's like if you're just doing like a dive
(24:19):
or whatever and it's like thirty feet of water and
you're down for like half an hour or something like that,
you're just breathing compressed air, like they just took air
out of the air and put it into a tank,
and that's what you're breathing, and you're fine out of
the air exactly. So if you're down for a while
and you have this problem with too much oxygen or
too much nitrogen, they started to get kind of crafty
(24:41):
with the stuff that they put into the tanks. There's
something called nitrox which deals with, um, the problem of
nitrogen arcosis by removing a certain amount of the nitrogen
and replacing it with oxygen. So with compressed air, with
regular air that we breathe here at sea level, UM,
it's something like seventy eight percent nitrogen. Yes, and like
(25:03):
no oxygen, is that right? I had them backwards. Oxygen
seventy eight percent nitrogen. In nitrox, you have something like
thirty six percent oxygen and the rest of nitrogen. So
because you have far less nitrogen there, you are susceptible
to the bends and nitrogen our coast is less susceptible
(25:24):
than you would be breathing compressed air, So you can
go down further and you can stay down longer. But
the problem is, like you were saying, that oxygen toxicity
can be an issue too, so they've come up with
even even other stuff. Yeah, you can breathe helium. There's
something called helios seventy helium oxygen. The weakness here is
(25:45):
or I guess, the downside is that you lose body
heat six times faster than with compressed air nitrox, So
then you gotta think about hypothermia. It's cold down there,
it is cold. And then there's one called trimex, which
is oxygen, nitrogen and helium, and apparently this is what
you use for the deepest dives. Yes, And it's like
all of these things have their pluses and their minuses.
(26:07):
There is no perfect gas, but people have figured out
things like um like if you want to use helios um,
you can stay down longer. You're not gonna get nitrogen arcosis,
and your case of the bends is probably you're less
susceptible to the bends because the nitrogen is not present.
But you also can't breathe that up closer to the surface.
(26:28):
There's not enough oxygen in it, so you have to
carry an extra tank of oxygen or mixed air to
to switch to as you get closer to the surface.
There's like a lot of different clever things you can
do to make it safer for you to stay down
longer and go further into a cave system when you're
diving in it. Yeah, and the rule of thumb is
(26:48):
they go by the rule of thirds, which I saw
it described a little bit differently than the House of
Works article describes it. The way I saw it was
because you want to make sure you always have two
thirds of your inc left when you're at your deepest
part of the dive. Yeah, I think that's what Fuller's said.
Maybe he just said it in the way that sounded
a little backwards, but yeah, that's that's the rule though,
(27:11):
is if you know you're going to go to us
the very deepest spot you're going to. You want to
only use one third of your oxygen of your tank
mixture to get that far, because sometimes it can take
longer to get get out than it did to get in,
and you want to be back on the surface with
a third left in your tank. Basically right. Plus, don't
forget you're also going to have to slowly unscrew the
(27:33):
cap on the soda bottle. It takes time, and therefore
it takes some of your air, your gas and your
tank to um to do the decompression schedule and slowly
work your way up to keep those nitrogen bubbles from
um explosively producing in your blood. How do those tables work?
Do you have no idea? Do you just learn this stuff?
(27:54):
You have it like on your piece of paper. Yeah,
I mean obviously not just regular. It's it's laminated. It's laminated.
It's basically But you're looking and I'm sure if you're
an experienced diver you know those things back and forth.
But because there's such a thing as nitrogen narcosis or hydrogen,
you can breathe hydrogen, but apparently it has a trippy
effect on you too. You would want to be able
(28:17):
to have something to look at, so you're not just
relying on your brain. But they haven't printed out. Yeah,
so the idea is like how much leeway is it?
Like you can't go like don't go ten feet higher
or you're in big trouble, Like it can't be. It's
not down to the inch or anything, right, it's I
don't think it's that, although I suspect that as we advance,
like we'll have it down to the inch and like
(28:39):
by different kinds of people in genetics and stuff like that,
But right now it is. I think it isn't graduated
in ten feet or maybe ten meters because that's an atmosphere,
but it says stay at this depth for this amount
of time before moving up ten meters to hang out
for another minute. So I think it's longer than that. Yeah. Um,
(28:59):
And what you're doing is you're allowing the nitrogen that's
dissolved in your blood to turn back into gas, go
to your lungs and then be expiated to be breathed
out by you slowly. That's what you're doing. And so
they figured out that after say ten minutes at thirty meters,
you have removed enough of that blood or that nitrogen
(29:20):
from your blood that you can safely move up to
the next ten ms above and you're neutral. At this point,
you're just hanging out, hanging up and rising unless you
try to know you have a buoyancy vest that is
is keeping you neutral. Yeah, you're just hanging out. Yeah,
you don't want to rise. Now, if you're in big
trouble and like you're out of air, you want to
(29:40):
make your way to the surface and just take pressure,
you know, press your luck right, Like, I'm either going
to drown or have the bends and maybe the bens
won't kill me, but drowning will definitely kill me, even
though we learned that drowning is not necessarily what you
think it is. Um the that's but if you aren't
in any trouble, you want to go through the decompression schedule, Okay,
(30:01):
got it? Yeah, I mean I just I knew about
this stuff, but I've never really kind of thought about
exactly how that worked. I wonder if we do need
to do a Scooba episode now, maybe maybe not. I mean,
what are you doing while you're waiting around? You're just
waiting around looking at the fish, looking at fish? If
you're with the camp. You should be with a buddy.
(30:22):
It's tough to communicate unless you have radio, and in
which case, if you do have radio, you're probably listening
to XM or something like that instead. But you can
communicate with hand signals or US. Sure, yeah, you could
listen to stuff you should know. Would be nice. It's
a great idea. So let's go back to traveling. We
talked about the grabbing pull, the pulling glide, grabbing float.
(30:46):
Uh you can also have one of those. And this
is what I would totally have, one of those cool
little dpvs driver propulsion vehicle. It's the little torpedo looking
us sort of like a boat, uh for peller that's
enclosed and it just pulls you along. You just hang
onto it and it drags you behind it. Yeah. I
always thought those were really cool. Yeah, they're cool. They're
(31:08):
kind of James BONDI very much. But that's gonna save
you from breathing uh more because you're exerting yourself. It's
going to save you from just exerting. You know, you're
not gonna be as tired. I mean, think about it,
diving for miles under the Earth's surface, like for miles along.
Even though you're floating, you're still working. Yeah, yeah, that
(31:29):
little kick your your ankles are going to get tired
after a while, your little ankles. Yeah, and that would
help a lot. But I would imagine you really want
to practice on that thing, because if it got away
from you, it's gonna pull you into like a cave
wall or something like that. You're in trouble. Kick up
that silt. I would think that little propeller will kick
up silt. I guess if you're not on the bottom,
(31:49):
I think you keep it away from the bottom. All right,
I think we should take another break and we'll talk
about what I think is one of the cooler parts
about this whole thing, or these guidelines right for this
spoiler alert large sk sk s. All right, you're underwater,
(32:26):
you're hundred feet into a cave. It's pitch dark. You've
got your little flashlight, but you need a little trail
of bread crumbs, right, yeah, more than that. You can
get disoriented down there, even if you're super experienced. So
you need something that says go this way, uh to
to live right, So you have guidelines, like not written guidelines, no, no,
(32:51):
an actual literal guideline right. Um. And they were laid however,
many years before by people who originally explored the cave,
and they the yellow lines or gold lines I'm sorry,
are yellowish and color and they use those as like
the main line through the main parts of the cave. Yeah,
and it's like a little thinner than a rope, but
(33:13):
it's basically a nylon string that is throughout the main tunnels.
Like you said, these little side tunnels are gonna have
white lines if you branch off and you know, you know,
you look at the color and you know where you
are basically in a side tunnel or the main channel,
and they end within about five to ten feet of
the main line. Um. That main line too, doesn't go
(33:34):
right to the top of the entrance because apparently that
is an invitation for dumb dumbs to say, like, hey, look,
let me see where that leads, right, So they don't
even put them on the surface, no fifty ft from
the entrance like you said. Yeah, I saw a really
interesting video from the nineties called a Deceptively Easy Way
to Die, And it's like blood on the asphalt, but
(33:56):
for cave diving, it's like an instructional video. Recreation in
crazy camera shaking like it's out of control. Yeah. Um.
And the guy it's from the the cave Diving chapter
of the National Splunking Society. Um, and like it really
like it is meant to scare you. The guy even says, like,
(34:18):
am I scaring you a little bit? Good? It's just
like like a car safety video but ended with the
song cave diving don't do it right? He Um? Is
that a Heather's reference? I think so. Um. But he
was saying, this guy who was astounding, it was almost
like he was a Ventrila. Christy barely moved his mouth
(34:38):
and words were coming out, I gotta go watch this. Um.
But he was saying, not only did they not put
um like the lines near the mouths of caves to
tempt people. They say, if you're not an experienced cave
diver going on a cave dive, but you're gonna be
diving somewhere in the area of a cave, don't even
take a light with you, just to keep yourself from
being tempted, from being like, oh, I gotta light, let
(35:00):
me go down in this. If you don't have a light,
even the most foolish among us probably would not go
into a cave, but if you do have a light,
you might try it even experience. For sure, that makes sense,
but you're still a dumb dumb to do exactly. Uh.
They do have entry lines though, and that is if
you go to it explore in a cave. It's it's
a temporary line that you do and you this is
(35:22):
the one that you do, tie to a big rock
on the surface, and then you take that to the
main line that's fifty two feet inside and then everything's
all connected. Because John makes a great point, you've got
to be able to if in the worst case scenario,
if it's dark down there, pull yourself along this line,
give the okay sign to your buddy. Um, and you've
(35:45):
got to maybe do this in total darkness with your
eyes closed, so your flashlights off where it's silty silt out. Yeah,
that's scary stuff. I have the impression that you're kind
of supposed to be hanging on to this guideline basically
all the time, Yeah, or like pinches away from it
(36:06):
at all times. I would want it within grabbing distance
for sure. Yeah. Did you read up about the Dorf markers.
I predicted that the Dorf markers existed, because yeah, before
I got to that part, I was like, surely they
have thought of this, like an arrow. Yeah, it's it's
like a plastic basically arrow on the line saying this way,
not that way. Because I mean, if you're in a
(36:28):
cave system and you turn around, you were like, wait
a minute, doesn't look anything like what I thought. I
just came through panic. Luckily you have the guideline, but
which way is the guideline leading you? So that's what
these dwarf markers are, their arrows pointing the way to
the mouth of the cave, the way out. Basically, did
you see the history of the Dorf marker, because immediately
(36:49):
was like, why is it called a Dorf marker? It
was just such a weird name. And apparently I got
this from a brief history of the cave diving line
arrow by Alexander Cofield Fief And Uh, there was a
death in nineteen at Peacock Springs in Florida where pre
dwarf marker, and I guess this person died from the
(37:12):
situation you just explained, like went deeper into the cave
instead of on the planet. I know. Uh. And a
man named Lewis Holzendorf invented this thing out of duct tape.
So he made these duct tape arrows and they called
him Darf markers. But because they were dwarf I'm sorry,
because they were tape and all dwarfed up, they would
deteriorate or fold up and not work over time. So
(37:35):
later on flash forward, a man named Forrest Wilson invents
these modern dwarf markers and one of the stipulations he
was like, we gotta call him Darf markers still, which
was very cool. But these are finally made out of plastic.
It's a plastic triangle you folded over the line and
snap it shut basically. So thanks to Forest Wilson and
Lewis Holsendorf, the worst case scenario is I'm getting out
(37:58):
of here and you're just going deeper. Then will never happen.
Forest Wilson told everybody we go out to call him
dodarf markers, and they're like, after a Wholsendorf, He's like,
who oh, man, that's a good dumb joke. Take a
lot of set up to the I just used up
a lot of our air, all right, So you've got
these dwarf markers, they're telling you where to go. You're diving.
(38:22):
If it's just a regular sort of and I was
about to call it a recreational dive, but technically it's
a technical dive. But if you're just out there having
a good time, you're probably down there for about an
hour or so at least. But if you're really like
doing scientific investigation or inquiry, or if you're after a body,
then you can be down there for hours and hours
doing your thing. So, um, some of these extraordinarily long
(38:45):
cave dives can last into the double digits of hours,
and they'll have tanks placed along the path basically where
tanks maybe all right, the ghost of Orf himself is
handing these out. Um, I don't know if he's dead
or not yet, Tim Conway Noldorf. Yeah, I don't think
(39:08):
he's with this, Okay, Yeah, so he's this friendly patron
spirit who hands out tank I think, although who knows,
he may still be around. Well, why did you say
that you didn't think he was? And I got the
idea because someone else developed it and named it after him,
that it was in memorium. I might have been wrong. No, No,
it's like it's a good point. At any rate, they'll
leave tanks along the way so you can be like, well,
(39:28):
here's my new fresh tank. It's pretty pretty amazing. But yeah,
these the cave dives can last very very long time.
And like you're saying, when they're doing this stuff, there
probably are being employed by maybe the National Geographic Society,
a museum, uh, some university, and they're exploring the geology
(39:48):
of these caves that no one has ever seen before.
They're also conducting underwater archaeology, which is a huge new
aspect for cave diving because what they figured out is
we we've lost a lot of human settlement um archaeology
when the sea levels rose after you know, eleven thousand
years ago and people were running around in America on
(40:10):
the coast more than we realize. And we're starting to
figure that out because of this cave diving archaeology that's
become a thing. Yeah. The uh, the largest as in
longest not deepest um underwater cave is in Tuloom on
the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, and they, I think it
(40:31):
was a few years ago, discovered that two flooded caves
actually connected, making it the longest. It's two hundred and
fifteen miles. If these things, you know, if you go
from end to end and and there are um tons
and tons of Mayan like extinct animal stuff and Mayan
artifacts like you were talking about, it just the waters
(40:53):
rose and then stuff just got sucked in. Yeah. They
found the oldest, mostly in techs Ellaton in North America.
In one of those caves, the Hoyo Negro. Uh. It
was a woman named Nea and a I A I
believe that's what they named her. And um she was
from something like a fourteen thousand, five hundred years ago, wow,
(41:18):
which is way older than the Clovis people. Can you
imagine coming upon that it would be pretty neat? Yeah, yeah,
but this is what cave divers do. Yeah. Yeah, it's
one of the things. The deepest is pretty new as
far as findings go. Well, the deepest in America is
Phantom Springs Cave in Texas, which is chump Change at
four hundred and sixty two ft. The deepest now it
(41:40):
passed Italy's Pozzo del Metro um it is in the
Czech Republic and Pozzo Demorros uber to this one. The
Ranika pro post is dred and twenty five ft deep.
It's amazing. And I don't think they've gone to the bottom.
I think they go as far as they can go,
(42:01):
and then I think they drop a line and measure
from there, right exactly. Yeah, that's and apparently GPS doesn't
work at all in these cave systems. It's just impenetrable. Um,
so they have to tie off ten ft increments on
rope and just lower it down. That's how they figured
out the one in the Czech Republic. And this is
a big team. This isn't just like alright, we got
(42:24):
our buddy system. It's like you've got a lot of
people involved in something like this, right, for safety obviously, yeah,
and for some fellowship and for fun. Yeah. The reception
afterward is quite nice. Right, So how do you do this?
How do you get certified? Oh? Well, um, there's a
lot of steps you want to take. You want to
become a basically a professional open water diver first with
(42:48):
years and years of experience. Yeah, this one guy said,
at least fifty dives before you even think about a cave, right, um.
And then after that you want to start training for
cavern diving. Yeah, you want to do that for a
couple of years, your toes wet and then right, and
then you start doing cave diving. And one of the
ways they didn't think about this, but it makes sense.
One of the ways you train for cave diving is
doing night diving, taking a night diving course. Yeah, because
(43:11):
there's no water. Yeah, there's no sunlight. There are probably
night diving in caverns or something like that. That's probably
kind of creepy too. Yeah, but once you are a
certified cave diver, you are part of basically the top
one percent of divers in the world. There's I saw
an estimate of seventy five professional caves in the world. Yeah. Um,
(43:35):
so you're part of a very elite group who are
actually exploring, like pushing the limits of human exploration on
Earth right now. Yeah, And I saw the one guy
who was who had um I think it was a
guy who helped out with the rescuing Thailand, which we
got to talk about. Yeah, I mean he was saying,
you know, this stuff is tough to do because you
think you just go in and retrieve a body, but
(43:56):
it's a crime scene first of all, so you can't
phote to graph it, so you have to go down
there and first look around and make as many mental
notes as you can to recreate this for an artist perhaps,
or for at least note taking. And uh, he said,
it's really tough emotionally, um and physically to get the
body out. It's not you gotta be made of tough
(44:19):
stuff exactly. That's it. You didn't have any else on it. Well,
I wanted to talk about the the Thaie cave rescue.
That's what we were going on. But the thing is,
there weren't anybody's There was one former Thie seal Navy
seal who died, and because he died, the Thai Navy realized,
we don't have any professional cave divers and stuff. We
(44:41):
need to make this part of our formal training. So
now they do have that. Yeah, but in two thousand
and eighteen in the summer, you know, the whole world
was watching because these these twelve soccer players and their
coach were hiking along in a cave system that got
flooded from a monsoon. When they were trapped in what
became us some cave and um, just from everything we
(45:04):
learned about cave diving, the idea that they managed to
get all twelve of the soccer players and their coach
out to safety in one of the most treacherous types
of caves you can dive, and no one died except
for this one diver is astounding man. Yeah, and that
the one guy was talking about just how silty it
(45:24):
was down there. And uh so you're trying to rescue
these people with a minimal movement as possible, so you're
not getting a silt out conditions. I just where's that
movie it's got to be coming, sure, Yeah, yeah, is
that you got anything else? Uh, Hugh Jackman, lead diver,
Why not? I got nothing else? I mean, I guess
(45:48):
this last part about regulations is it's not super highly regulated.
You're sort of um dealing with the local authorities and
it sounds like, uh like how ortis or treacherous hiking.
You gotta you gotta check in with an office and
usually say this is what I'm doing, this is where
when I'm going in and when I'm coming out, and
(46:08):
you gotta sign that little piece of paper when you return,
otherwise they're going to come looking for you. Yeah. But
there's also places where you like, you can cave dive
all you want, where you just pay a fee. They
just are like, go with God, do your thing. There's
this a flooded mine. I've talked about before I don't remember,
must have been the Abandoned Minds episode in Bond Tear, Missouri.
It's just this a flooded nineteenth century mine. Like vog
(46:33):
could clear water a hundred foot visibility and you just
swim around the mine. Hey, there's Rambo, But was he
in the mine? Yeah? You head out in the mind
in First Blood. I'll bet we had the same conversation
the Abandoned Minds episode, because I don't recall it. Are
you got anything else? Nope? Well, if you want to
know more about abandoned Minds, almost said, if you want
(46:54):
to more about cave diving, read about it. Probably don't
do it. Uh. And since I said it's time for listening, oh,
you can read about on how stuff works. Even that's right.
And since I said that it's time for listening, I'm
gonna call this one of the follow ups from our
Conversion Therapy podcast. We got a lot of really good
responses on that and one bad one. Did you see
(47:18):
that guy? I didn't see that one? Now. Yeah, we
had a guy who wrote said he was quitting us
because our liberal bias. But it was interesting because he says, well,
I don't think conversion therapy is something that works. I
do think that homosexuality is a disease. He's one of those.
And uh yeah, I wrote him back and just I
was very nice. I was like, you could probably find
podcasts that are better suited for you. You didn't say, Sionara,
(47:40):
no cultural appropriation. Yeah, I just said good luck to you, sir.
That was very classy. Chuck. Yeah. Um. I always think
it's interesting when people write us to tell us they're
quitting us. Have you ever taken the time to do
I have not. You just quit something, right, Yeah, yeah,
keep it to yourself, maybe, like you know, and about
(48:00):
it to friends for a little while to get it
off your chest. But like, just so you know, person
president I've never met. Uh this is from Jordan's He says, hey, guys,
is a Southern Baptist turned agnostic. I absolutely detest the
acceptance of the garbage psychotherapy pseudoscience of CT. Josh mentioned
(48:20):
that have you ever been an early teenager and uh,
late teenager? You know what it's like to be sexually
confused or curious. When I was between the ages of
fourteen and seventeen, I was called gay or the F word.
Many times. I did have what some might consider tell
tell signs stereotypically at least associated with being gay. The
bullying and verbal abuse was so intense and frequent, I
(48:41):
truly started to question my sexual preferences. That question was
put to bed quite definitely, definitively one night when a
very good male friend of mine and I decided to
experiment some I'll spare the specifics, but I realized that
night this is just was not doing it for me,
but being the good Baptist boy that I was, I
felt guilty about that night, and even though I was
(49:03):
not aroused, it was still a homosexual act. I carried
that guilt with me for many years and through college,
until I realized almost every other male friend of mine
had some kind of experience that they could look back
on and say this is when I knew I was
straight or gay, or buy or trans or whatever. At
that point, I was finally able to let go of
that guilt, and what a relief that was to my
mental health. I wanted to thank both of you for
(49:25):
making the point that an experience or a feeling you
have in that time of your life should not be
anything to feel guilty about. I didn't know that when
I was, and I was mentally abusive to myself over
a long time. What a shameful is how many people
would use the knowledge of such an act as a
weapon to abuse the person even more. Boo his. So
(49:46):
to every teenager out there, please don't think there's something
wrong with you because of your curiosity. Embrace yourself. Don't
worry about what your peers or elders may think. You
are perfect the way you are. Nice boom. That's from
Jordan's Thanks Jordan. Jordan wasn't even an on im. It's
good for you Jordan's Yeah, he even drew a little
mic dropping right. That was a great email. Yeah, that's funny.
If the guy who said he wrote in to say
(50:07):
he was quitting us, he's like, oh, cave Jing, I'll
give him. He gets the listener emails, he's gonna send
us another email. He's like, oh, this next one is
called the gay disease. Maybe I should listen. Uh. Well,
that was very nice for Jordan to shout it out
to everybody out there. Way go if you want to
shout something out to support and encourage your fellow humans.
(50:29):
We love that stuff. You can go on to stuff
you should Know dot com and send us something on
one of our social links. Or more better, you can
go to your email client and send us an email
to stuff podcasts at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you
Should Know is a production of iHeart Radios. How stuff
(50:50):
works for more podcasts for my heart radio because at
the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Hey, everybody, it's me Josh and there's Chuck over there,
and we just wanted to drop in to tell you
we're going on tour and you should come see us.
That's right. We are going to be in Seattle. I
think that show is close to sold out, so you
can always poke around for tickets. Sometimes they become available,
why not? And uh, what date is that? That is Thursday, January,
(00:20):
that's right. And then we're taking a ticket Friday after relax,
that's what we do. And then we're going to San
Francisco Sketch Fest on Saturday. That's right. We're going to
be there on January tenth of the Castro Theater. And
if you want to see us, well, then go to
s Y s K live dot com or the s
F Sketch Fest dot com website and you can get
(00:41):
tickets to come see us on Saturday January, that's right.
And if you're still around on Sunday the nineteenth, then
you want to come see Movie Crush live, you can
do that as well. It will be intimate and fun.
Nice get intimate with Chuck. Everybody. We'll see in January.
Welcome to Steff. You should know a production of I
Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
(01:10):
I'm Josh Clark, Nurse Charles W. Danger is his middle name,
even though it begins with W. Bryant. And there's Jerry
Jerome Roll. We're gonna stick with Jerome, Okay, it's a
good cave diver's name. Yeah, I have just my regular
name because I would never in a million years cave dive.
(01:32):
But I never even scuba dived. Fat I have. Yeah,
I believe that open water stuff. I got really um
like I guess csick right afterwards two and I was
convinced that it had to do with the arrows breathing.
I was like, I'm done, which sticks because it was
really cool. Breathing underwater is one of the neatest experiences
(01:54):
you will ever have. It's really cool, but not not
snorkel like you're totally you're under water and you're breathing,
even as it's pool. It doesn't matter. Just take like
a scuba lesson once and you'll you'll there, you go,
You're done. I have dreams where I can breathe underwater
a lot, but it's not like, hey, I'm aquaman and
(02:14):
I'm just breathing like a fish or something. It's that
I figured out how to very slowly draw in air,
very carefully from the water around me. It's it's really
a strange dream, but I have it a lot. It's
pretty cool. Yeah, I'm not sure what it means. I
don't either. I can't even begin to guess. But what's
(02:36):
more boring than talking about someone's dreams? They say that
nothing is more boring than that. Yeah, I thought that
was a pretty interesting one though. If you're going to
talk about your dream, that's a good one to go with. Um,
we're not talking about your dreams today though, Chuck. No,
we're talking about cave diving, right, which is not a dream. Again,
I'm with you. I don't think it's not for me.
Like I couldn't even go like regular cavings so lunking,
(03:00):
which I did the one time, right, I can't remember.
Did you enjoy it? I did? It was a butt
kicker physically, very hard work. But I remember describing the
pancake thing that I went through where the you know,
I was laying on my back squirming through in the
in the rock face was three inches above my body
(03:20):
and face and you could you're getting nervous now I
don't even like hearing about it. Yeah, that was a
little weird, and I'm not even a claustrophobic guy, but
I was like, this is you know, you could die
in here. I've read about a poor guy, maybe the
poorest of all time, well one of them, who was
caving with his family, friends and family and got stuck
(03:44):
and ended up dying. His his like, they could get
to him, they could move his foot, they could touch
his leg legs, but he was just so stuck that
they just couldn't do anything for him, and so they
decided to go home. He died. No, they were there
the whole time, but he over like I think the
course of twenty four hours. He he just died the
slow she's terrifying death. So they couldn't They could reach
(04:07):
his foot, but not his mouth, clearly, yes, to give him,
you know, nutrients. They tried to give him stuff through
an ivy. I think they tried to give him a
sedative and it kept falling out of his leg, so
they couldn't even do that. Oh gosh, it was bad.
It's hard to even here about. I know, man, but
this is cave diving, which is even more dangerous than caving. Yeah,
(04:29):
and there's a couple of a few types of diving.
There's the open water diving that you were talking about,
there's cavern diving. An open water diving just means, if
you know, if you get in trouble, go up and
you'll reach the surface. You're not gonna get hit in
the head by a cave ceiling or pinned down through crevasse. No.
(04:50):
Cavern diving is a little different in that you're in
a cavern, but you should be able to see sunlight
above you and if you go up you can get
your head out. Eventually you're from what I saw, the
definition is your no more than seventy ft deep and
you're within a hundred and thirty linear feet of the
cave mouth or more specifically, your surroundings are illuminated by daylight.
(05:15):
That's that's really what separates cavern diving from cave diving.
It's kind of like remember a bio speleology episode, So
this would be the twilight zone between the dark zone
and the light zone. That that would be kind of
cavern diving diving in the twilight zone. Right. Then you
get to cave diving, and that is serious business. This
is not. Uh, what's considered recreational diving? Uh, this is
(05:41):
going deep and dark? Yeah with David re going deep
with David Rees, I haven't spoken to recent a while.
I love that guy. Oh, he's a great guy. So
this is a technical diving. Can give another definition of deep.
Wasn't on that Reefe joke, going deep wasn't good enough.
(06:04):
Cave diving is diving with an overhead environment, so that
separates it from open water environment. If you goes and
panic and swim straight up, you're gonna bonk your head. Yeah,
you might have gone to under foot um there and
you have no direct vertical access to open air surface
or light. Yeah, this is extremely important. Bas horror, a nightmare,
(06:30):
a living nightmare that you're doing on purpose that you've
paid it a lot of money to equip yourself for. Um.
The light thing is a really big one too. Like,
here's the thing. It's really easy because you're thinking that
this is cave diving and the word caves in there
and we're talking about caves, but it's scuba diving really,
but it's scuba diving inside a cave. This is a
(06:50):
really important thing to not lose sight of. It's a cave.
It's deep in the bowels of the earth. Yes, there
are there's no light. There's only light is the light
that you have and you're moving through it underwater. This
is cave diving. I'm in awe of people who do this,
and I could watch videos of it all day long. Yeah,
(07:11):
it's very cool to see. Um, it's like scuba plus
as far as the creep factor goes. I read one
article about a guy who is a cave diving researcher.
And as we'll see, you know, there's scientific discoveries that
have been made in these caves because just like the
the deep dry caves, the things that live in there
(07:32):
are remarkable. Um. And this guy was sixty nine years
old and still going strong and said his family, you know,
always worries about him, but he super experience, knows what
he's doing. But it's still fraught with danger. I do
have a few death stats if you want. I read
a scientific presentation called thirty years of American cave diving Fatalities.
(07:56):
Two thou you got the same one? Huh. This is
by the divers A Network. A hundred and sixty one
divers had died over that. Uh. What how long was
that thirty year period. Uh, sixty seven of them were trained,
eighty seven were untrained, which is crazy, Like, I don't
know what they're doing down there to beginner with a
fool Yeah, if you just take up cave diving for
(08:18):
the first time, but like, yeah, exactly, because sixty seven
trained cave divers perished. Yeah, and how chuck? How what
was the vast majority? Most common cause was aphixia due
to drowning preceded by running out of breathing gas, usually
after getting lost because of a loss of visibility caused
by suspended silt. And that's where most of these are
(08:42):
in Florida, And that's where I learned about the silt
out also from the article you sent about the um
the cave rescue in Thailand in Thailand, which was apparently
very silty. And a silt out is when so much
silt gets kicked up that it just blacks out even
with your light source. Yeah. The guy that was in that,
I think it was an article in Atlantic um with
(09:05):
a guy and it was named Robert Layard. I think
he's a cave diving expert. And he said, you can
put your light up to your mask and you can
kind of see your light, but that's it, and you're
in a cave, so you don't know where to go.
Even feeling your way around is not going to help you. Um.
And the problem with a silt out is they can
last for so long in a bad a bad case
(09:26):
of a silt out, that you will run out of
air before the silt settles enough for you to see through,
So it's a bad jam. Well. And then this that
you probably read the same interviews, but there's a panic
is what this guy said is what usually happens even
with an experienced diver, because there's no escape, there's no
quick way out, and things tend to have a domino effect.
(09:49):
So if you're in a silt out, like you said,
it's you try and stay as still as possible, and
it's still maybe not gonna work. You're getting nervous, the
kind of fidgety now that you've pointed out it's panic
inducing just to think about it, Like you have to
remain perfectly still in the total darkness, and that might
(10:10):
not even be good enough to let that salt stuttle
settle I I saw um and even a bigger estimate
of the number of deaths from cave diving. From the
National Speleological Society's cave Diving section, they estimated more than
four deaths in the history of cave diving, but they
said in the world, okay, that the other one is
(10:34):
just o was it just America? Okay. They placed a
lot of them towards the beginning of cave diving, which
took which started in the fifties or sixties. Hey, I
wonder what's in their stage? Yeah, which is crazy because
scuba diving started in about the fifties. So within a
little while of somebody inventing scuba diving, some people were like, oh,
let's go into caves with this stuff. And they started dying.
(10:55):
And so they pointed out like these people didn't give
their lives in vain. Each day was a lesson learned
for everyone else who who um, you know, was yet
to come. But a lot of people died early on,
and it's gotten much. They are far fewer deaths from
cave diving. But it's like you said, there there typically
are cave diving experts who are dying because they're pushing
(11:17):
themselves further and further. If you have you know, no
one's cave died before every cave you dive into is
a new exploration and this is a huge driver for
people who cave died. This is why they do it.
They're seeing something that no other human on Earth in
most cases, has ever seen in the history of humanity.
They're the first human to be in this place. Um,
(11:39):
there's lots of stuff to discover for when humans were there,
but now it's flooded. Um, there's there's just a lot
of discovery. But as it's been going on for decades now,
every time somebody discovers a new thing, that's one thing
that that is not left to be discovered by everybody else.
So they're pushing themselves further and further. When you cave dive,
(12:01):
you might be a hundred feet under sea level, but
you might be scuba diving for miles down through a
cave system downward necessarily, yeah, horizontal miles. Um, you know,
round trip for this this cave dive, which is nuts,
but that's that's what they do. Yeah. I don't even
(12:22):
remember where I was going with that. I started to
get panicked again. Have you seen Once upon a Time
in Hollywood? Yeah, you know the scene with Brad Pitt
on the boat in his in that sixty scuba gear.
It's just so cool looking at Before we say this,
I come from the future to warn us in the
past that we should add spoiler alert here. That was that. Uh,
it's like when they used to call him skin divers. Yes,
(12:45):
do you think he killed his wife? Uh? Well, I
think that's what you were led to believe. Whether I
felt like it was up in the air well a
little bit. Uh. Also could have been an accident because
he was clearly had that spear gun resting on his
knee pointing at her right. Um. Yeah, The question is
did his neurons fire and make his finger move right? Okay,
(13:08):
so he took care of the spoiler that was like
five minutes ago, I know. And now we're back to
cave diving and we should talk a little bit about equipment.
This A lot of this came from one of our
old House Stuff Works colleagues from the website, our old
buddy John Fuller, who looks like mc estro. Like he's
been mentioned twice. Then he's the tie that binds the
(13:29):
Estra episode and the cave diving episode. Yeah, and some
of this equipment thing isn't the most exciting stuff in
the world. But we should talk about it anyway. I
found it frankly arousing. You got your mask, uh, and
this is something I didn't know. Um. They used sort
of simple black masks because it absorbs light. Yeah, um,
(13:50):
which makes sense. Yeah, because you're using your own light source,
so it can get pretty bright. I saw a flashlight
from under water kinetics. Maybe it's like fifteen thousand lumens
some ridiculous amount of lumens, a lot of lumens um.
And yeah, if you have that stuff bouncing all over
(14:12):
the place, you don't want your light, your your you know,
gold glitter, diamond dusted mask, reflecting it in your eyes
cuts down invisibility. But I take issue with Fuller saying
that they favorite simple masks because these guys do like
the full face like be a mask. Yeah, not the
bread pitt skin diver sixties mask, which I loved. Yeah,
(14:35):
I think I think some of them might. But I
also saw plenty of them have like you know, I'm
trying to think of what to call it, but just
a really cool full face mask. Yeah. It looks like
something that you could dive in a cave in or
go to outer space in. Basically. Yeah. So then you've
got your fins again, black rubber fins. But the difference
(14:57):
here and uh that I gather from this and open
water because you don't want those super long, super bindy
fins because you're trying to not kick up silt, so
you want those shorter, stiffer fins. Uh. And when you're
down there swimming around, you're using little, short, controlled kicks. Yeah, no,
big sweeping leg movements. No, it's a huge, huge difference
(15:19):
between cave diving and open water diving. Open witer diving,
your legs are extended out behind you and you're fluttering
those um, those fins up and down and you're propelling
yourself forward. In In cave diving, you're bent. Your legs
are bent at the knees, so your feet are up
slightly above you, and mostly you're making frog kicks, which
(15:40):
are all in the ankle, and you're just kind of
waddling yourself along with these little kicks. You see what
I'm saying. I love for twelve years you've been doing
little physical gestures of me like anyone else in the
world could see them. Well, who am I talking to?
But you know that's the whole point. So the frog
look chuck like this is what they do little frog kicks.
(16:00):
But in doing that that you cut down on the
potential of um coming in contact with the rest of
the cave. There's a couple of reasons why you want
to do that. One, you want to preserve the cave.
If you break off a stalactite, stalactite coming from the
ceiling um, that's a that's nature's work that you just
messed with. You don't want to do that, bro. And
(16:21):
then secondly, a lot of caves, pretty much all of
them have that silt sediment on the bottom. If you
kick it up, you've got a silt out, So you
you want to really be careful what kind of um
movement you're making with your fins, and then just how
big your fins are and how flexible they are. And
then one other thing about that too. You also want
(16:43):
to maintain basically perfect buoyancy where you're completely neutrally buoyant
relative to the top and the bottom of the cave. Yeah,
what do they call the movement dragon float, pulling, glide
glide float. Yeah, it's sort of the same you do
when you recover a body. Well, a lot of this
(17:04):
is body recovery very sadly. Um, well, not a lot
of it, but part of search and rescue can very
much involve going deep and getting very swollen, water logged bodies.
But yeah, you pull yourself along with your hand, like
in a little groove by the rock and then just
let yourself glide. It seems very relaxing considering you're doing
the most horrifying thing on the planet. Yeah, so you
(17:26):
might do that even instead of kicking, depending on where
the space is, how tight it is that kind of thing. Also,
it depends on how um uh solid the surroundings are,
like you wouldn't do that or anything like that. Um
And then also apparently you only do that when you
have a current. There's one thing we should say, there's
two kinds of cave diving, spring diving and sump diving.
(17:51):
And in spring diving that's where you see like the
pictures in like National Geographic magazine where it's just this
beautiful cave and there's just two people in scooba gear
floating in the middle of it. That's a spring fed
cave where you've got water moving through it keeping it
very clear because there's no way for sediment to settle
(18:11):
because the currents moving to to um quickly and you
use that current to pull and glide. That looks like
something has a little bit more appeal. Yeah, but I
mean it's just as dangerous as anything else. Like you said,
most of the people who die in cave diving die
in Florida, And that's what they're doing, is diving in
those springs U And the other time the sump kind
(18:32):
those are a little more scary to me. That's a
cave system where if you imagine like kind of like
a zigzag like Charlie Brown's shirt, say, that's the cave system.
The inside of the cave, half of the bottom half
is covered with water that you have to scooba through,
but you also have to climb over through dry parts
(18:53):
in air and then get down to the to the water. Again.
That's the sump kind of that's super sediment and you
really got to know what you're are doing there. That's
the most dangerous kind by far. Uh. You have your
suit that you're wearing, and you can wear a wet suit,
standard wet suit or a dry suit. These are not cheap.
They cost, you know, several thousand dollars per a good one.
(19:14):
All this equipment is not cheap. Uh, So it's not
the kind of thing that you just sort of decided
to try out, right, So you have to be wealthy
and totally out of your mind to cave die. Dry
suits are sealed off, so you know, if you've ever
put on a wet suit, part of the process is
getting in that cold water and letting it fill up
your wet suit, which will warm it up. That's the
(19:36):
idea eventually, is that water warms. But that process isn't fun.
Getting in and out of a wet suit isn't fun neither,
to be honest. And it's not that flouttering. No gotuits
to it, you know. Uh, we had to wear them
when we scoop it up with the whales, the whale sharks.
It seems like a hundred years ago. It was easily
a hundred years ago. The dry suits seal off that water,
(19:58):
so you are dry. That's why they call it a
dry suit. Your body doesn't get wet um. And the
cool thing here is that you can layer up some clothing,
uh and then put on this suit because you can
stay warmer. It's a much more pleasant imaging silkies or something. Yeah.
I love the silkies. Uh. And then John makes a
good point. You want to you want to have like
(20:19):
extras of just about everything. Like you don't go down
there with a flashlight. I'd have eight flashlights strapped to
every single lamb on my body, like I'm sure they
carry like an extra. I would have a bunch of
extra light. Yeah, you get your little knife if you
get snagged, you cut things. I would have nine knives,
(20:39):
eight flashlights. Well, you do want a redundant amount of stuff,
like you were saying, like you just because if something
goes wrong down there, you are toast unless you can
slowly and deliberately get yourself back to the surface of
the ocean. That's right, that's so yeah. But the other
thing you want to do too is you're in very
(21:00):
cramp quarters here, so everything has to be strapped down
pretty closely to your body or in like a pocket,
because you can't have any stuff hanging down because you'll
get tangled up. I don't want to get tangled up
down there. But I know this is kind of amateur
hour stuff because we're not a good breaking point. But
we should probably take a nab break right here. No,
I think it's a great time and we'll talk about
(21:21):
how you breathe down there right after this sk that's
what SKO you should know. Sorry, everyone, I'm so sorry.
(21:48):
So you need to breathe down there. Everyone has seen
a scuba tank, um, but it's a little bit different.
It's quite a bit different in fact than open water diving. Um.
You're going to need uh, different things to go that deep,
different kinds of air mixtures. Uh. And there are a
(22:08):
few different kinds that you can use. But we should
probably talk a little bit about the bins and what
happens to your body. I know we covered the bens
in uh the which one was it the what was
the old time diving suit called diving bell? Was it
diving bell? I think we covered the bens. We must have,
probably so, yeah, because we've never done a scuba episode.
(22:30):
So John from his original House of Works article makes
a very great point about pressure and talks about soda
bottles and obviously if you shake up a soda bottle
and then open it really quick, it's going to go everywhere.
Or if you're Josh and you've never in your life
apparently opened a tonic bottle, I thought it was tonic?
Was probably both really, yeah, you've got to open those
(22:52):
very very slowly every time, no matter if it's shaken
or not. I don't think any of those are my fault.
But um like every backstage we've ever been to has
tonic and soda on the floor. If there, I'm cursed
with that. But if you do shake up a soda
bottle in the difference between opening it quickly and very
very slowly is can be related to how the human
(23:14):
body reacts under the pressure of that water. Yeah, so
in this case, when you're scuba diving, opening the cap
is analogous to slowly making your way back up to
the surface at a graduated set of time. They're both
decompression basically, is what it is. And so you could
have rapid decompression where your soda goes everywhere, or your
(23:35):
blood vessels burst, or you can follow these timetables to
um to get the nitrogen bubbles out of your blood.
And like you're saying, that's a big it's a big
problem with scuba diving, especially if you're down below a
hundred feet UM for an extended period of time, the
nitrogen um can really build up in your blood, which
(23:56):
can give you the bends you can also suffer from
nitrogen narcosis, which is bad news where you apparently feel
like you're drunk because of your because you're intoxicated on nitrogen. Yeah,
the same thing can happen with oxygen. Yeah, Um, it's different,
but you can have oxygen what's it called oxygen toxicity? Right,
So there's like if you're just doing like a dive
(24:19):
or whatever and it's like thirty feet of water and
you're down for like half an hour or something like that,
you're just breathing compressed air, like they just took air
out of the air and put it into a tank,
and that's what you're breathing, and you're fine out of
the air exactly. So if you're down for a while
and you have this problem with too much oxygen or
too much nitrogen, they started to get kind of crafty
(24:41):
with the stuff that they put into the tanks. There's
something called nitrox which deals with, um, the problem of
nitrogen arcosis by removing a certain amount of the nitrogen
and replacing it with oxygen. So with compressed air, with
regular air that we breathe here at sea level, UM,
it's something like seventy eight percent nitrogen. Yes, and like
(25:03):
no oxygen, is that right? I had them backwards. Oxygen
seventy eight percent nitrogen. In nitrox, you have something like
thirty six percent oxygen and the rest of nitrogen. So
because you have far less nitrogen there, you are susceptible
to the bends and nitrogen our coast is less susceptible
(25:24):
than you would be breathing compressed air, So you can
go down further and you can stay down longer. But
the problem is, like you were saying, that oxygen toxicity
can be an issue too, so they've come up with
even even other stuff. Yeah, you can breathe helium. There's
something called helios seventy helium oxygen. The weakness here is
(25:45):
or I guess, the downside is that you lose body
heat six times faster than with compressed air nitrox, So
then you gotta think about hypothermia. It's cold down there,
it is cold. And then there's one called trimex, which
is oxygen, nitrogen and helium, and apparently this is what
you use for the deepest dives. Yes, And it's like
all of these things have their pluses and their minuses.
(26:07):
There is no perfect gas, but people have figured out
things like um like if you want to use helios um,
you can stay down longer. You're not gonna get nitrogen arcosis,
and your case of the bends is probably you're less
susceptible to the bends because the nitrogen is not present.
But you also can't breathe that up closer to the surface.
(26:28):
There's not enough oxygen in it, so you have to
carry an extra tank of oxygen or mixed air to
to switch to as you get closer to the surface.
There's like a lot of different clever things you can
do to make it safer for you to stay down
longer and go further into a cave system when you're
diving in it. Yeah, and the rule of thumb is
(26:48):
they go by the rule of thirds, which I saw
it described a little bit differently than the House of
Works article describes it. The way I saw it was
because you want to make sure you always have two
thirds of your inc left when you're at your deepest
part of the dive. Yeah, I think that's what Fuller's said.
Maybe he just said it in the way that sounded
a little backwards, but yeah, that's that's the rule though,
(27:11):
is if you know you're going to go to us
the very deepest spot you're going to. You want to
only use one third of your oxygen of your tank
mixture to get that far, because sometimes it can take
longer to get get out than it did to get in,
and you want to be back on the surface with
a third left in your tank. Basically right. Plus, don't
forget you're also going to have to slowly unscrew the
(27:33):
cap on the soda bottle. It takes time, and therefore
it takes some of your air, your gas and your
tank to um to do the decompression schedule and slowly
work your way up to keep those nitrogen bubbles from
um explosively producing in your blood. How do those tables work?
Do you have no idea? Do you just learn this stuff?
(27:54):
You have it like on your piece of paper. Yeah,
I mean obviously not just regular. It's it's laminated. It's laminated.
It's basically But you're looking and I'm sure if you're
an experienced diver you know those things back and forth.
But because there's such a thing as nitrogen narcosis or hydrogen,
you can breathe hydrogen, but apparently it has a trippy
effect on you too. You would want to be able
(28:17):
to have something to look at, so you're not just
relying on your brain. But they haven't printed out. Yeah,
so the idea is like how much leeway is it?
Like you can't go like don't go ten feet higher
or you're in big trouble, Like it can't be. It's
not down to the inch or anything, right, it's I
don't think it's that, although I suspect that as we advance,
like we'll have it down to the inch and like
(28:39):
by different kinds of people in genetics and stuff like that,
But right now it is. I think it isn't graduated
in ten feet or maybe ten meters because that's an atmosphere,
but it says stay at this depth for this amount
of time before moving up ten meters to hang out
for another minute. So I think it's longer than that. Yeah. Um,
(28:59):
And what you're doing is you're allowing the nitrogen that's
dissolved in your blood to turn back into gas, go
to your lungs and then be expiated to be breathed
out by you slowly. That's what you're doing. And so
they figured out that after say ten minutes at thirty meters,
you have removed enough of that blood or that nitrogen
(29:20):
from your blood that you can safely move up to
the next ten ms above and you're neutral. At this point,
you're just hanging out, hanging up and rising unless you
try to know you have a buoyancy vest that is
is keeping you neutral. Yeah, you're just hanging out. Yeah,
you don't want to rise. Now, if you're in big
trouble and like you're out of air, you want to
(29:40):
make your way to the surface and just take pressure,
you know, press your luck right, Like, I'm either going
to drown or have the bends and maybe the bens
won't kill me, but drowning will definitely kill me, even
though we learned that drowning is not necessarily what you
think it is. Um the that's but if you aren't
in any trouble, you want to go through the decompression schedule, Okay,
(30:01):
got it? Yeah, I mean I just I knew about
this stuff, but I've never really kind of thought about
exactly how that worked. I wonder if we do need
to do a Scooba episode now, maybe maybe not. I mean,
what are you doing while you're waiting around? You're just
waiting around looking at the fish, looking at fish? If
you're with the camp. You should be with a buddy.
(30:22):
It's tough to communicate unless you have radio, and in
which case, if you do have radio, you're probably listening
to XM or something like that instead. But you can
communicate with hand signals or US. Sure, yeah, you could
listen to stuff you should know. Would be nice. It's
a great idea. So let's go back to traveling. We
talked about the grabbing pull, the pulling glide, grabbing float.
(30:46):
Uh you can also have one of those. And this
is what I would totally have, one of those cool
little dpvs driver propulsion vehicle. It's the little torpedo looking
us sort of like a boat, uh for peller that's
enclosed and it just pulls you along. You just hang
onto it and it drags you behind it. Yeah. I
always thought those were really cool. Yeah, they're cool. They're
(31:08):
kind of James BONDI very much. But that's gonna save
you from breathing uh more because you're exerting yourself. It's
going to save you from just exerting. You know, you're
not gonna be as tired. I mean, think about it,
diving for miles under the Earth's surface, like for miles along.
Even though you're floating, you're still working. Yeah, yeah, that
(31:29):
little kick your your ankles are going to get tired
after a while, your little ankles. Yeah, and that would
help a lot. But I would imagine you really want
to practice on that thing, because if it got away
from you, it's gonna pull you into like a cave
wall or something like that. You're in trouble. Kick up
that silt. I would think that little propeller will kick
up silt. I guess if you're not on the bottom,
(31:49):
I think you keep it away from the bottom. All right,
I think we should take another break and we'll talk
about what I think is one of the cooler parts
about this whole thing, or these guidelines right for this
spoiler alert large sk sk s. All right, you're underwater,
(32:26):
you're hundred feet into a cave. It's pitch dark. You've
got your little flashlight, but you need a little trail
of bread crumbs, right, yeah, more than that. You can
get disoriented down there, even if you're super experienced. So
you need something that says go this way, uh to
to live right, So you have guidelines, like not written guidelines, no, no,
(32:51):
an actual literal guideline right. Um. And they were laid however,
many years before by people who originally explored the cave,
and they the yellow lines or gold lines I'm sorry,
are yellowish and color and they use those as like
the main line through the main parts of the cave. Yeah,
and it's like a little thinner than a rope, but
(33:13):
it's basically a nylon string that is throughout the main tunnels.
Like you said, these little side tunnels are gonna have
white lines if you branch off and you know, you know,
you look at the color and you know where you
are basically in a side tunnel or the main channel,
and they end within about five to ten feet of
the main line. Um. That main line too, doesn't go
(33:34):
right to the top of the entrance because apparently that
is an invitation for dumb dumbs to say, like, hey, look,
let me see where that leads, right, So they don't
even put them on the surface, no fifty ft from
the entrance like you said. Yeah, I saw a really
interesting video from the nineties called a Deceptively Easy Way
to Die, And it's like blood on the asphalt, but
(33:56):
for cave diving, it's like an instructional video. Recreation in
crazy camera shaking like it's out of control. Yeah. Um.
And the guy it's from the the cave Diving chapter
of the National Splunking Society. Um, and like it really
like it is meant to scare you. The guy even says, like,
(34:18):
am I scaring you a little bit? Good? It's just
like like a car safety video but ended with the
song cave diving don't do it right? He Um? Is
that a Heather's reference? I think so. Um. But he
was saying, this guy who was astounding, it was almost
like he was a Ventrila. Christy barely moved his mouth
(34:38):
and words were coming out, I gotta go watch this. Um.
But he was saying, not only did they not put
um like the lines near the mouths of caves to
tempt people. They say, if you're not an experienced cave
diver going on a cave dive, but you're gonna be
diving somewhere in the area of a cave, don't even
take a light with you, just to keep yourself from
being tempted, from being like, oh, I gotta light, let
(35:00):
me go down in this. If you don't have a light,
even the most foolish among us probably would not go
into a cave, but if you do have a light,
you might try it even experience. For sure, that makes sense,
but you're still a dumb dumb to do exactly. Uh.
They do have entry lines though, and that is if
you go to it explore in a cave. It's it's
a temporary line that you do and you this is
(35:22):
the one that you do, tie to a big rock
on the surface, and then you take that to the
main line that's fifty two feet inside and then everything's
all connected. Because John makes a great point, you've got
to be able to if in the worst case scenario,
if it's dark down there, pull yourself along this line,
give the okay sign to your buddy. Um, and you've
(35:45):
got to maybe do this in total darkness with your
eyes closed, so your flashlights off where it's silty silt out. Yeah,
that's scary stuff. I have the impression that you're kind
of supposed to be hanging on to this guideline basically
all the time, Yeah, or like pinches away from it
(36:06):
at all times. I would want it within grabbing distance
for sure. Yeah. Did you read up about the Dorf markers.
I predicted that the Dorf markers existed, because yeah, before
I got to that part, I was like, surely they
have thought of this, like an arrow. Yeah, it's it's
like a plastic basically arrow on the line saying this way,
not that way. Because I mean, if you're in a
(36:28):
cave system and you turn around, you were like, wait
a minute, doesn't look anything like what I thought. I
just came through panic. Luckily you have the guideline, but
which way is the guideline leading you? So that's what
these dwarf markers are, their arrows pointing the way to
the mouth of the cave, the way out. Basically, did
you see the history of the Dorf marker, because immediately
(36:49):
was like, why is it called a Dorf marker? It
was just such a weird name. And apparently I got
this from a brief history of the cave diving line
arrow by Alexander Cofield Fief And Uh, there was a
death in nineteen at Peacock Springs in Florida where pre
dwarf marker, and I guess this person died from the
(37:12):
situation you just explained, like went deeper into the cave
instead of on the planet. I know. Uh. And a
man named Lewis Holzendorf invented this thing out of duct tape.
So he made these duct tape arrows and they called
him Darf markers. But because they were dwarf I'm sorry,
because they were tape and all dwarfed up, they would
deteriorate or fold up and not work over time. So
(37:35):
later on flash forward, a man named Forrest Wilson invents
these modern dwarf markers and one of the stipulations he
was like, we gotta call him Darf markers still, which
was very cool. But these are finally made out of plastic.
It's a plastic triangle you folded over the line and
snap it shut basically. So thanks to Forest Wilson and
Lewis Holsendorf, the worst case scenario is I'm getting out
(37:58):
of here and you're just going deeper. Then will never happen.
Forest Wilson told everybody we go out to call him
dodarf markers, and they're like, after a Wholsendorf, He's like,
who oh, man, that's a good dumb joke. Take a
lot of set up to the I just used up
a lot of our air, all right, So you've got
these dwarf markers, they're telling you where to go. You're diving.
(38:22):
If it's just a regular sort of and I was
about to call it a recreational dive, but technically it's
a technical dive. But if you're just out there having
a good time, you're probably down there for about an
hour or so at least. But if you're really like
doing scientific investigation or inquiry, or if you're after a body,
then you can be down there for hours and hours
doing your thing. So, um, some of these extraordinarily long
(38:45):
cave dives can last into the double digits of hours,
and they'll have tanks placed along the path basically where
tanks maybe all right, the ghost of Orf himself is
handing these out. Um, I don't know if he's dead
or not yet, Tim Conway Noldorf. Yeah, I don't think
(39:08):
he's with this, Okay, Yeah, so he's this friendly patron
spirit who hands out tank I think, although who knows,
he may still be around. Well, why did you say
that you didn't think he was? And I got the
idea because someone else developed it and named it after him,
that it was in memorium. I might have been wrong. No, No,
it's like it's a good point. At any rate, they'll
leave tanks along the way so you can be like, well,
(39:28):
here's my new fresh tank. It's pretty pretty amazing. But yeah,
these the cave dives can last very very long time.
And like you're saying, when they're doing this stuff, there
probably are being employed by maybe the National Geographic Society,
a museum, uh, some university, and they're exploring the geology
(39:48):
of these caves that no one has ever seen before.
They're also conducting underwater archaeology, which is a huge new
aspect for cave diving because what they figured out is
we we've lost a lot of human settlement um archaeology
when the sea levels rose after you know, eleven thousand
years ago and people were running around in America on
(40:10):
the coast more than we realize. And we're starting to
figure that out because of this cave diving archaeology that's
become a thing. Yeah. The uh, the largest as in
longest not deepest um underwater cave is in Tuloom on
the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, and they, I think it
(40:31):
was a few years ago, discovered that two flooded caves
actually connected, making it the longest. It's two hundred and
fifteen miles. If these things, you know, if you go
from end to end and and there are um tons
and tons of Mayan like extinct animal stuff and Mayan
artifacts like you were talking about, it just the waters
(40:53):
rose and then stuff just got sucked in. Yeah. They
found the oldest, mostly in techs Ellaton in North America.
In one of those caves, the Hoyo Negro. Uh. It
was a woman named Nea and a I A I
believe that's what they named her. And um she was
from something like a fourteen thousand, five hundred years ago, wow,
(41:18):
which is way older than the Clovis people. Can you
imagine coming upon that it would be pretty neat? Yeah, yeah,
but this is what cave divers do. Yeah. Yeah, it's
one of the things. The deepest is pretty new as
far as findings go. Well, the deepest in America is
Phantom Springs Cave in Texas, which is chump Change at
four hundred and sixty two ft. The deepest now it
(41:40):
passed Italy's Pozzo del Metro um it is in the
Czech Republic and Pozzo Demorros uber to this one. The
Ranika pro post is dred and twenty five ft deep.
It's amazing. And I don't think they've gone to the bottom.
I think they go as far as they can go,
(42:01):
and then I think they drop a line and measure
from there, right exactly. Yeah, that's and apparently GPS doesn't
work at all in these cave systems. It's just impenetrable. Um,
so they have to tie off ten ft increments on
rope and just lower it down. That's how they figured
out the one in the Czech Republic. And this is
a big team. This isn't just like alright, we got
(42:24):
our buddy system. It's like you've got a lot of
people involved in something like this, right, for safety obviously, yeah,
and for some fellowship and for fun. Yeah. The reception
afterward is quite nice. Right, So how do you do this?
How do you get certified? Oh? Well, um, there's a
lot of steps you want to take. You want to
become a basically a professional open water diver first with
(42:48):
years and years of experience. Yeah, this one guy said,
at least fifty dives before you even think about a cave, right, um.
And then after that you want to start training for
cavern diving. Yeah, you want to do that for a
couple of years, your toes wet and then right, and
then you start doing cave diving. And one of the
ways they didn't think about this, but it makes sense.
One of the ways you train for cave diving is
doing night diving, taking a night diving course. Yeah, because
(43:11):
there's no water. Yeah, there's no sunlight. There are probably
night diving in caverns or something like that. That's probably
kind of creepy too. Yeah, but once you are a
certified cave diver, you are part of basically the top
one percent of divers in the world. There's I saw
an estimate of seventy five professional caves in the world. Yeah. Um,
(43:35):
so you're part of a very elite group who are
actually exploring, like pushing the limits of human exploration on
Earth right now. Yeah, And I saw the one guy
who was who had um I think it was a
guy who helped out with the rescuing Thailand, which we
got to talk about. Yeah, I mean he was saying,
you know, this stuff is tough to do because you
think you just go in and retrieve a body, but
(43:56):
it's a crime scene first of all, so you can't
phote to graph it, so you have to go down
there and first look around and make as many mental
notes as you can to recreate this for an artist perhaps,
or for at least note taking. And uh, he said,
it's really tough emotionally, um and physically to get the
body out. It's not you gotta be made of tough
(44:19):
stuff exactly. That's it. You didn't have any else on it. Well,
I wanted to talk about the the Thaie cave rescue.
That's what we were going on. But the thing is,
there weren't anybody's There was one former Thie seal Navy
seal who died, and because he died, the Thai Navy realized,
we don't have any professional cave divers and stuff. We
(44:41):
need to make this part of our formal training. So
now they do have that. Yeah, but in two thousand
and eighteen in the summer, you know, the whole world
was watching because these these twelve soccer players and their
coach were hiking along in a cave system that got
flooded from a monsoon. When they were trapped in what
became us some cave and um, just from everything we
(45:04):
learned about cave diving, the idea that they managed to
get all twelve of the soccer players and their coach
out to safety in one of the most treacherous types
of caves you can dive, and no one died except
for this one diver is astounding man. Yeah, and that
the one guy was talking about just how silty it
(45:24):
was down there. And uh so you're trying to rescue
these people with a minimal movement as possible, so you're
not getting a silt out conditions. I just where's that
movie it's got to be coming, sure, Yeah, yeah, is
that you got anything else? Uh, Hugh Jackman, lead diver,
Why not? I got nothing else? I mean, I guess
(45:48):
this last part about regulations is it's not super highly regulated.
You're sort of um dealing with the local authorities and
it sounds like, uh like how ortis or treacherous hiking.
You gotta you gotta check in with an office and
usually say this is what I'm doing, this is where
when I'm going in and when I'm coming out, and
(46:08):
you gotta sign that little piece of paper when you return,
otherwise they're going to come looking for you. Yeah. But
there's also places where you like, you can cave dive
all you want, where you just pay a fee. They
just are like, go with God, do your thing. There's
this a flooded mine. I've talked about before I don't remember,
must have been the Abandoned Minds episode in Bond Tear, Missouri.
It's just this a flooded nineteenth century mine. Like vog
(46:33):
could clear water a hundred foot visibility and you just
swim around the mine. Hey, there's Rambo, But was he
in the mine? Yeah? You head out in the mind
in First Blood. I'll bet we had the same conversation
the Abandoned Minds episode, because I don't recall it. Are
you got anything else? Nope? Well, if you want to
know more about abandoned Minds, almost said, if you want
(46:54):
to more about cave diving, read about it. Probably don't
do it. Uh. And since I said it's time for listening, oh,
you can read about on how stuff works. Even that's right.
And since I said that it's time for listening, I'm
gonna call this one of the follow ups from our
Conversion Therapy podcast. We got a lot of really good
responses on that and one bad one. Did you see
(47:18):
that guy? I didn't see that one? Now. Yeah, we
had a guy who wrote said he was quitting us
because our liberal bias. But it was interesting because he says, well,
I don't think conversion therapy is something that works. I
do think that homosexuality is a disease. He's one of those.
And uh yeah, I wrote him back and just I
was very nice. I was like, you could probably find
podcasts that are better suited for you. You didn't say, Sionara,
(47:40):
no cultural appropriation. Yeah, I just said good luck to you, sir.
That was very classy. Chuck. Yeah. Um. I always think
it's interesting when people write us to tell us they're
quitting us. Have you ever taken the time to do
I have not. You just quit something, right, Yeah, yeah,
keep it to yourself, maybe, like you know, and about
(48:00):
it to friends for a little while to get it
off your chest. But like, just so you know, person
president I've never met. Uh this is from Jordan's He says, hey, guys,
is a Southern Baptist turned agnostic. I absolutely detest the
acceptance of the garbage psychotherapy pseudoscience of CT. Josh mentioned
(48:20):
that have you ever been an early teenager and uh,
late teenager? You know what it's like to be sexually
confused or curious. When I was between the ages of
fourteen and seventeen, I was called gay or the F word.
Many times. I did have what some might consider tell
tell signs stereotypically at least associated with being gay. The
bullying and verbal abuse was so intense and frequent, I
(48:41):
truly started to question my sexual preferences. That question was
put to bed quite definitely, definitively one night when a
very good male friend of mine and I decided to
experiment some I'll spare the specifics, but I realized that
night this is just was not doing it for me,
but being the good Baptist boy that I was, I
felt guilty about that night, and even though I was
(49:03):
not aroused, it was still a homosexual act. I carried
that guilt with me for many years and through college,
until I realized almost every other male friend of mine
had some kind of experience that they could look back
on and say this is when I knew I was
straight or gay, or buy or trans or whatever. At
that point, I was finally able to let go of
that guilt, and what a relief that was to my
mental health. I wanted to thank both of you for
(49:25):
making the point that an experience or a feeling you
have in that time of your life should not be
anything to feel guilty about. I didn't know that when
I was, and I was mentally abusive to myself over
a long time. What a shameful is how many people
would use the knowledge of such an act as a
weapon to abuse the person even more. Boo his. So
(49:46):
to every teenager out there, please don't think there's something
wrong with you because of your curiosity. Embrace yourself. Don't
worry about what your peers or elders may think. You
are perfect the way you are. Nice boom. That's from
Jordan's Thanks Jordan. Jordan wasn't even an on im. It's
good for you Jordan's Yeah, he even drew a little
mic dropping right. That was a great email. Yeah, that's funny.
If the guy who said he wrote in to say
(50:07):
he was quitting us, he's like, oh, cave Jing, I'll
give him. He gets the listener emails, he's gonna send
us another email. He's like, oh, this next one is
called the gay disease. Maybe I should listen. Uh. Well,
that was very nice for Jordan to shout it out
to everybody out there. Way go if you want to
shout something out to support and encourage your fellow humans.
(50:29):
We love that stuff. You can go on to stuff
you should Know dot com and send us something on
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to stuff podcasts at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you
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(50:50):
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If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
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'Monster: BTK', the newest installment in the 'Monster' franchise, reveals the true story of the Wichita, Kansas serial killer who murdered at least 10 people between 1974 and 1991. Known by the moniker, BTK – Bind Torture Kill, his notoriety was bolstered by the taunting letters he sent to police, and the chilling phone calls he made to media outlets. BTK's identity was finally revealed in 2005 to the shock of his family, his community, and the world. He was the serial killer next door. From Tenderfoot TV & iHeartPodcasts, this is 'Monster: BTK'.
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