Nature in Florida is so weird??
I was out hiking where the trail ran alongside this river that was moving pretty fast, but a couple miles in it just disappeared.
The river was gone. It just stopped, like someone had snipped it in half and taken away the rest.
So I stopped and stared at it a while, trying to figure out what the heck was going on, because the water was flowing very rapidly, but the river had abruptly ended.
Finally, this old man in a pair of worn overalls stopped next to me to watch as well, before leaning over and asking
I responded “yes”, and he continued:
“It goes underground here, pops back up some three miles west. Not the best swimmin’ spot, for obvious reasons, though that don’t stop people from tryin’.”
So I asked him what he meant and he said,
“Lots of dumb folk with no regard for God’s nature die out here every year. Scientists, usually.”
We talked a little more and eventually went our separate ways, but when I got home I decided to look in to what happens to the river when it plunges underground like that.
It turns out it submerges and travels through a complex cave system for a few miles, and millions of gallons of pressurized water travels through there each day.
Apparently, when water levels were low enough during a drought, researchers were able to send divers and probes through the cave system and found both animal and human remains, some of which included mastodons, dire wolves, saber-toothed cats and more. The human remains date back to about 7500 BC.
Anyway, Florida is weird and we have deadly underground rivers filled with cool prehistoric animals I guess.