Cave Diving: Totally Nuts

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 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. 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.

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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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. 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.

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

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. 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, 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 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, 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

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. 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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, 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, 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 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, 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, 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 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,

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 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, 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 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

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 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. 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 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 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

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 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. 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 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 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 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. 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

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, 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 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, 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 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 how you breathe down there right after this sk that's what SKO you should know. Sorry, everyone, I'm so sorry. 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

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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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. 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 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, 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 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? 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 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 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, 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 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 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,

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. 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. 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 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 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,

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, 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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,

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 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 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 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

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, 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 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, 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

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

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

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, 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 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 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

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 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

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 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 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 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 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

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,

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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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. 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 works for more podcasts for my heart radio because at the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.