The Great Blue Hole

The Great Blue Hole

The Great Blue Hole is a large sink hole off the coast of Belize. It lies near the center of the Lighthouse Reef, a small atoll 70km from the mainland. The hole is almost perfectly circular in shape, almost 1000 feet wide and about 410 feet deep. The site was made famous by Jacques-Yves Cousteau, who declared it one of the top ten scuba diving sites in the world. In 1971, he brought his ship, the Calypso, to the hole to chart its depths.

The Great Blue Hole is a part of the larger Belize Barrier Reef Reserve System, a World Heritage Site of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).