AN AUSTRALIAN MARINE BIOLOGIST HAS DISCOVERED A PREVIOUSLY UNKNOWN BLUE HOLE in a remote area of the Great Barrier Reef, some 120 miles/200 kilometers from the nearest island.

Unlike the famous 400-foot-deep Great Blue Hole of Belize, this blue hole is about 100 feet/300 meters deep at its center and serves as a protected habitat for healthy corals, fish and other marine life. To keep it that way, he won’t tell anybody where it is.

PROTECTED HABITAT

Marine Biologist Johnny Gaskell searched Google Maps for blue holes, which might have served as protected habitats, after a Category 4 cyclone passed over the area some five months earlier.

The video captures large healthy colonies of corals and other life. The marine life habitat extends to about 65 feet/20 meters, Gaskell noted. Below that the hole is mostly sediment.

He says he will revisit the site and also continue to search for other blue holes in the GBR.

PRINCIPAL SOURCES: ”See inside the Great Barrier Reef’s incredible blue hole for the first time,” Lost at E Minor; “Peer Inside a Mysterious Blue Hole in the Great Barrier Reef,” National Geographic; Johnny Gaskell Instagram; “How a Massive ‘Blue Hole’ in the Great Barrier Reef Went Unnoticed for So Long,”  Inverse.com.