Cave diving is one of the most challenging and potentially dangerous of sports that takes you to the depth of water-flooded caves. No amount of open water experience can prepare you for the cave environment. Even certified cave divers have drowned in underwater caves.

The Good Divers are alive just because they have adhered to instructions about Training, Guidelines, Depth rules, Air management and Lights. If you are going to adopt this safety mantra then chalk out your adventurous cave diving trip to any these hazardous cave diving sites...

• Underground rivers of Mexico

There is no area in the world with as many underwater caves as the Yucatan Peninsula’s Riviera Maya. The peninsula is a land rich in both human and natural history.

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Cenote Cave Diving in the Yucatan , Image credit: Chris E

The caves in Mexico are a rarity because of speleothems, which form only in a dry cave, but in Mexico, they exist underwater. That is because these caves were all dry during the last ice age. Carbon dating of artifacts found in some area caves shows them to have been visited by humans over 9,000 years ago.

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Gran Cenote, Tulum, Mexico, Image credit:
Laura Nicholson and Leo Avery

About 2 500 natural wells form entrances to the system that once provided the entire Maya people of Yucatan with water. There are no rivers above ground. Even big Maya cities like Chichen Itza were dependent on the wells.

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Pure waters with shades of blue and green , Image credit: Sanibeljac

The three largest underwater cave systems in the world: Sistema Ox Bel Ha, Sistema Nohoch Nah Chich, and Sistema Dos Ojos, all exist within twenty miles of each other. Combined, they account for 55% of explored passageway. Two of them, Ox Bel Ha, and Nohoch Nah Chich, flow directly into the Caribbean Sea.

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Dos Ojos Cenote cavern cave, Image credit

• Cave diving in Florida

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Entering Little River Springs, Florida, Image credit: Angel shark

Florida is pretty much the home of modern cave diving, most modern procedures and equipment come from there and a lot of what happens in Florida is propagated beyond the niche cave world to the technical diving world as a whole. Central Florida boasts some of the best cave diving in the world. Depths range from 40 ft to almost 400ft.

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Image credit: Barry Miller

The North Floridian Aquifer expels groundwater through numerous first-magnitude springs, each providing an entrance to the aquifer’s labyrinthine cave system. These high-flow springs have resulted in Florida cave divers developing special techniques for exploring them, since some have such strong currents that it is impossible to swim against them. The sites are there for you to pick: Peacock State Park, Orange Grove, Cows Spring, Telford Spring, Little Rivers Spring, Troy springs and Ginni Spring.

The Wakulla system in Florida springs is the largest single-source freshwater spring in the world, which is explored exclusively by a very successful and pioneering project called the WKPP.