Divers in Mexico’s Underwater Caves Get a Glimpse of Rarely Seen Artifacts, Fossils and Human Remains #archaeology #history #mexico #caves

The lagoon-like entrance of an unnamed cenote stretches out near the Caribbean Sea. Martin Broen

Smithsonian Magazine has an article about the underwater caves of Mexico.  They call them cenotes and these particular caves are located in the Yucatán Peninsula.  They date to a few million years ago and preserved remnants of the Mayan culture and sometime fossils of extinct animals.

The underwater caves of the Yucatán Peninsula are a window to the distant past. Through two million years and over multiple glaciation cycles, these caves have been transformed. When the sea level was high, the caves flooded, and their reach expanded.

During the ice ages, the caves dried out as the sea level dropped, and the seeping water from the surface decorated the caverns with deposits such as stalagmites and stalactites, collectively known as speleothems. Then, with the next cycle came higher sea levels again, flooding the caves and preserving in time the speleothems and everything else with them.