Scuba divers explore massive sinkhole at Australian beach

Scuba divers have explored inside the massive coastal sinkhole in Australia, releasing footage which shows the destruction beneath the water.

The hole, which formed at Inskip Point near Fraser Island, Queensland, on Sunday, sucked in a car, camping trailer and caravan as the earth opened up. It is thought to be at least 3 metres deep and led to hundreds of people being evacuated from the region.

In recent days, scientists have disputed the use of the term “sinkhole.” According to Stephen Fityus, a professor in geotechnical engineering at the University of Newcastle, “it’s very unlikely that the missing sand has been swallowed into some deep hole in the sea floor” but is more likely a landslide.

Despite the dangerous situation, some Australians made the most of their new swimming hole while the scuba divers from Wolf Rock Dive set out to capture the unusual underwater scene and attempt to help retrieve the vehicles.

Diver Mitchell Neumann told Mashable the family who lost the caravan had sold everything to buy it and all their possessions were inside. Unfortunately, the retrieval didn’t go as easily as planned. One towing company retrieved the camping trailer, but the second company working with the divers struggled to pull out the embedded caravan and car.

“After the first exploratory dive all that was [visible] was the back metre of the caravan chassis,” Neumann said. “We believe the whole car is buried as it’s still hooked to the van. All we managed to save was the back bar of the van and all the pieces of the van that had been ripped off.”

Neumann believes everything in the water is intact and in the two days spent on site the divers didn’t witness any leaking fuel or oil. “We retrieved what we could from the van, so the site is as clear from debris … however there is still going to be fluids in the car. Engine oil, fuel, things like that,” he said.

“It shouldn’t pose much of an environmental threat as it’s all sealed up. The sand will be tightly packed around everything … The hole will likely fill up with sand and within a year or two, the beach will be basically back to normal and not even the trees will be visible.”

The dive wasn’t an easy feat for the team with the amount of debris and trees mangled in the water body.

“The video really doesn’t show you how difficult it is to get in and around all the trees and debris that surrounds the whole area. A definite entanglement issue especially when using surface supply breathing apparatus!” diver Cheryl Maughan wrote on YouTube.

According to the divers, the bottom of the surface is almost liquid, and the footage shows remnants of the vehicles that crashed into the ocean submerged in the thick sand.

“Nothing is bottomless, however, the sinkhole has a false bottom,” a spokesperson for Wolf Rock Dive wrote on Facebook. “Who knows how far down the quicksand will go, we were in there today and what appears to be the seabed is actually a fluid soup of silt – a hard hat diver of old would just sink right through it.”

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