Endless Dread: The Mysterious Lagoon

Lagoa Misteriosa https://www.lagoamisteriosa.eco.br/, or Mysterious Lagoon, is located near the small Brazilian city of Jardim. Surrounded by lush jungle, the surface of the lagoon looks like azurite — still as glass and crystalline. Its waters are so clear, looking down you might expect to see the bottom, except... the bottom of Lagoa Misteriosa has never been found. Today on Endless Dread, our annual witch's hat tip to spooky season, Amory takes Ben deep down into the story, and mystery, of Lagoa Misteriosa. The story for Amory began on Reddit in r/thalassophia, a community devoted to the fear of deep water. Show notes: The bottom of this lake has never been found https://www.reddit.com/r/thalassophobia/comments/1vmoswb/the_bottom_of_this_lake_has_never_been_found/ (Reddit) Lagoa Misteriosa https://www.gruporiodaprata.com.br/midiakit/lagoa-misteriosa Footage of Misteriosa https://www.instagram.com/p/DZ3cxFSx0np/?hl=en (Lagoa Misteriosa on Instagram) Divers Have Descended More Than 220 Meters Into This Brazilian Lagoon — And Still Haven’t Found The Bottom https://dailydot.com/divers-have-descended-more-than-220-meters-into-this-brazilian-lagoon-and-still-havent-found-the-bottom (Daily Dot) Dave Not Coming Back | FULL DOCUMENTARY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQjaLhbVRr0 (YouTube) This content was originally created for audio. An auto-generated transcript is available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Heads up that some elements (i.e. music, sound effects, tone) are harder to translate to text.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questram School of Business. A recent episode looks at what the rise of the gig economy means for workers, businesses, and the future of work. Stick around until the end of this podcast to preview the episode.

• 0:21Speaker 01

  Fall never arrives all at once. First the air, then the light. And slowly, the things you love begin to find each other. A jacket meets a dress, a hoodie slips beneath a blazer, an old cap finds a new scarf. Because you don't simply step into the season, you create it, layer by layer, until it finally feels like fall. Find fall your way at Ross.

• 0:49Speaker 02

  Ally here with cash when you need it. Like after that fantastic meal, and it's time to tip your server. And your wallet's empty. Don't be in... Ally's got you covered with 75,000 fee-free ATMs nationwide. Ally Bank Member FDIC.

• 1:15Amory Sivertson?

  Hello?

• 1:18Ben Brock Johnson?

  Are you there?

• 1:22Amory Sivertson?

  I'm here.

• 1:22Ben Brock Johnson?

  Really?

• 1:24Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah.

• 1:24Ben Brock Johnson?

  Let me see you wave your arms around. Wave your little arms around.

• 1:28Amory Sivertson?

  I'm right where I said I would be.

• 1:31Ben Brock Johnson?

  Go closer to the red thing.

• 1:33Amory Sivertson?

  I am directly next to the red thing.

• 1:35Ben Brock Johnson?

  Okay, I see it. I see it. I see you. I saw you take the steps. Have you ever seen the movie Zoolander?

• 1:43Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:45Ben Brock Johnson?

  You look like you're going to a school for ants.

• 1:48Amory Sivertson?

  I can't see you.

• 1:51Ben Brock Johnson?

  I'm in a blue shirt. I'm very handsome, and I'm in a blue shirt.

• 1:59Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah, no, I don't see anyone who meets that description.

• 2:02Ben Brock Johnson?

  Come on.

• 2:06Ben Brock Johnson?

  I'm on the observation deck of View Boston, otherwise known as the top of the Prudential Center. And I'm a little bit more than 220 meters high. And I'm more than 700 feet, that means off the ground. And that's, that's why you look like you're going to a school for ants, as any fan of Zoolander would say.

• 2:29Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah, I'm on Boyleston Street, which is, as you can probably hear, is a, it's a pretty bustling street in downtown Boston that is more or less at the foot of the iconic Prudential Tower. I'm down here and you're up there because, as I think longtime threadheads will know, I don't like heights. I'm, I'm good down here. And I guess a corollary to being afraid of heights is being afraid of depths. And that's, that's what we're doing here today, because we're simulating something that I recently learned about on Reddit. So, Ben, rather than you being up high and me being on the ground, I want you to imagine

• 3:13Amory Sivertson?

  that you are on the surface of a body of water. And I am 220 meters below the surface. And not only am I deep underwater, another one of my favorite things, I'm in an underwater cave.

• 3:33Ben Brock Johnson?

  It's got a lot of traffic down there under the water.

• 3:38Ben Brock Johnson?

  Sorry, please go on.

• 3:39Amory Sivertson?

  Use your imagination. I'm in an underwater cave.

• 3:43Ben Brock Johnson?

  Well, of all the things that induced dread in Amory Sivertson, this feels like it's bringing them all together. Heights, depths.

• 3:54Amory Sivertson?

  Caves.

• 3:56Ben Brock Johnson?

  Caves.

• 3:57Amory Sivertson?

  And what's worse is that below my feet, the water keeps going down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down. In fact, the bottom of this body of water has never been found.

• 4:12Ben Brock Johnson?

  Ooh, bottomless dread?

• 4:16Amory Sivertson?

  Endless dread, you might say, Ben.

• 4:21Amory Sivertson?

  It's called Lagoa Misteriosa.

• 4:30Amory Sivertson?

  I'm Amory Deep Blue Sivertson.

• 4:33Ben Brock Johnson?

  I'm Ben Swim-to-the-Bottom Brock Johnson, and you're listening to Endless Dread.

• 4:39Amory Sivertson?

  Endless Thread's annual witches hat tip to spooky season. Or a flipper flip, in this case.

• 4:45Ben Brock Johnson?

  Squeeze into your wetsuit, strap on your air tank, because today, we are going deep.

• 5:05Amory Sivertson?

  Lagoa Misteriosa, or mysterious lagoon, is located near Jardim, Brazil, a small city in the Midwest of the country. And Ben, I first heard about this lagoon from the Thalassophobia subreddit. Do you remember what Thalassophobia is?

• 5:22Ben Brock Johnson?

  I pronounce it Thalassophobia, but...

• 5:25Amory Sivertson?

  Sure you do. Gotta be contrarian. Some people on the internet do, but I hear more Thalassophobia's.

• 5:31Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, no, I have no idea how to pronounce it, actually, so.

• 5:36Amory Sivertson?

  All right, wise guy, what is it?

• 5:38Ben Brock Johnson?

  I feel like it's, you know, it's fear of deep and big water stuff. So usually, it's like, you know, it's like this oil rig out, way out in the ocean footage, or it's like giant waves as this container ship, or it's like, look at this guy jumping into this spot. Yikes. It's that kind of zone.

• 6:04Amory Sivertson?

  So I have Thalassophobia. Definitely not as bad as some people, but I...

• 6:08Ben Brock Johnson?

  You're not cannonballing in there? You're not just like getting on in?

• 6:12Amory Sivertson?

  No, I do not like deep water. I can just sort of imagine something swimming up from the depths and pulling me under.

• 6:23Ben Brock Johnson?

  It's me. I'm swimming, I'm swimming up with some silly goggles on. I'm pulling on your ankle. And I'm like, come on, let's go down to the bottom. This is gonna be a long episode.

• 6:35Amory Sivertson?

  And so when I saw a post in the Thalassophobia subreddit, a couple of months ago, with the title, "The bottom of this lake has never been found," I and about 19,000 other Thalassophobes who upvoted this post, couldn't look away. So I want to give you a visual on this, because when we hear the word lagoon or lake, we might not be picturing this.

• 7:04Ben Brock Johnson?

  Okay, so in the first couple of videos here, I see like, basically, a first-person view of somebody walking along like a wooden sort of set of steps. And they're walking down to what is an interesting body of water, because it's actually not that big, and it's surrounded by the woods. Sort of, you're walking down into this space. And the top of this piece of water is, seems kind of like small, but then like, it's really a deep, dark, clear blue. And when the people get into the water, you start to get this sense of like, oh, this is actually a giant hole, but it's like vertical. It goes way down.

• 7:47Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah. And I think you're supposed to feel like, ooh, the vegetation, the logs, so beautiful, so clear, so crystalline. But I just think it all looks creepy.

• 7:58Ben Brock Johnson?

  You're like, nope, nope, nope, nope.

• 8:00Amory Sivertson?

  Yes, yes. But you like water a lot more than I do. So how, how does this make you feel?

• 8:06Ben Brock Johnson?

  I'm in, like, get me in. I'm like, get me in right now. I love it.

• 8:11Amory Sivertson?

  Okay. So when I was first dipping a toe into the story of Lagoa Misteriosa, I saw an official Instagram account for the lagoon. I reached out and pretty quickly heard back from this person.

• 8:24Speaker 05

  Hello?

• 8:25Amory Sivertson?

  Hi, is this Luisa?

• 8:27Speaker 05

  Yes, it's Luisa.

• 8:28Amory Sivertson?

  Luisa Quilio. She's an environmental engineer, and I'd caught her at a good time.

• 8:34Speaker 05

  We are actually going there to the farm where Lagoa Misteriosa is for the weekend.

• 8:41Amory Sivertson?

  Luisa and her family live a few hours away from the lagoon, but they make the trip a lot because her family owns Lagoa Misteriosa, which she'd mentioned to me in an email. And I thought maybe I was just like, misunderstanding her, but no.

• 8:57Speaker 05

  It's located in a farm, so we are the owners of that farm. And we also have the ecotourism operation that, that has the scuba diving and the snorkeling at Lagoa Misteriosa.

• 9:10Amory Sivertson?

  Luisa's ecotourism business there, snorkeling and scuba diving, started in 2011, but her family has owned the land since the late 1970s. And when they bought it, the lagoon already had its mysterious name. And there are several things that are mysterious about Lagoa Misteriosa. So let's dive in, shall we?

• 9:30Ben Brock Johnson?

  Okay, I'm ready. Let's go.

• 9:36Amory Sivertson?

  So as you've seen now, the lagoon is surrounded by lush jungly forest. And despite being known for its depth of unknown profundity, as you also noticed, Lagoa Misteriosa is not that big across.

• 9:50Speaker 05

  It's like the size of a soccer field, like a Brazilian soccer field.

• 9:55Amory Sivertson?

  You have to zoom way, way in on a map of Brazil to see the lake. And what you can't tell from a bird's eye view is that the lagoon is located at the bottom of a sinkhole.

• 10:08Amory Sivertson?

  So picture a steep crevasse, a soccer field wide, filled with water up to a certain point.

• 10:16Speaker 05

  You have to descend a bit more than 100 steps. So there's a big wooden staircase on the forest to reach Lagoa, and it's like on the bottom of the sinkhole.

• 10:29Amory Sivertson?

  So Ben, I know you're familiar with cenotes. You want to explain what those are?

• 10:35Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, I love me a cenote. I think the name is mostly referring to these sinkholes that exist on the Yucatan Peninsula. They're these giant kind of vertical caves that go way, way, way, way, way, way down. And they have this crystal clear water inside of them. They have these, you know, they have small fishes and stuff like that, but they're really fascinating and people love to jump in them and swim in them.

• 11:01Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah, so Lagoa Misteriosa is essentially that.

• 11:05Ben Brock Johnson?

  Okay.

• 11:05Amory Sivertson?

  It's not really a lagoon. It's not a shallow area of water that's separated off from a larger body of water. It's not really a lake. It's not a bunch of water that just pooled up in a giant basin.

• 11:18Speaker 05

  It's actually a triatic cave. So a cave formed through the dissolution of the water passing through the limestone region.

• 11:28Amory Sivertson?

  It's an underwater world that used to be hidden by limestone above it until the limestone eroded and collapsed. So we're going to get a little tour of Lagoa Misteriosa now from Luisa and from someone who's done a fair bit of diving there.

• 11:44Speaker 06

  My father was a spear fisherman here in Brazil. So I dived since I was like five, six years old.

• 11:51Amory Sivertson?

  This is Marcelo Kraus.

• 11:53Speaker 06

  I am a, well, I kind of was for some time in my life, a professional wildlife photographer, specializing in both nature and underwater images.

• 12:05Amory Sivertson?

  Until, Marcelo says, social media took the place of the magazines and publishers that would buy his photographs.

• 12:12Speaker 06

  You know, after three kids, two marriages, one divorce, bills get coming and I had to do something else, you know?

• 12:24Amory Sivertson?

  But Ben, Marcelo's photographs of Lagoa Misteriosa are incredible. They're why I reached out to him. And this is the very first one I stumbled upon.

• 12:35Ben Brock Johnson?

  Whoa. What you see in the photo, you see like a diver. And so you get a sense of scale. And the diver is really like a tiny, teeny, tiny little figure.

• 12:50Amory Sivertson?

  Gummy bear.

• 12:50Ben Brock Johnson?

  Gummy bear. In this giant blue hole, basically. And if you sort of like follow the motion of the photo down, at the sort of bottom of the photo, there's actually a tiny black hole, which you can really get a sense of like, oh, my God, it doesn't stop. Where the photo stops, it keeps going.

• 13:13Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah, he's, he's in the middle of this massive, narrow belly of the lagoon. But before we got in too deep, Marcelo set the scene for me. Lagoa Misteriosa is on private property, Luisa's family property. So you park your car near the entrance and then a transport takes you to the lagoon.

• 13:35Speaker 06

  Outside the lagoon is very steep. So you need to go down like a very, today there's a stair. They drop you there right at the beginning of the stairs and then you just go down.

• 13:47Amory Sivertson?

  This is that 100 or so wooden steps that Luisa was talking about. And as you've seen in some of the videos, the stairs don't end at the surface of the water. You can just keep descending about a dozen or so steps into this otherworldly scene.

• 14:08Speaker 06

  You can see, like in this clear day, you can see the other edge of the lagoon, actually. The water clarity that's, it's fantastic. There's logs and vegetation, fishes, everything like that in the borders.

• 14:24Speaker 05

  And when the sun is like high, the water, the water is very crystalline. It reaches up to 40 meters.

• 14:31Amory Sivertson?

  40 meters of visibility, Luisa means, or about 130 feet down. Which just thinking about that makes my stomach drop. But that's apparently not the sensation most people experience there.

• 14:46Speaker 06

  And because the water is really clean, you often get this, you know, this sensation that people say, oh, I'm floating and flying.

• 14:55Speaker 05

  You just feel like floating, like, like flying. Because there's really no bottom. So it's a very funny feeling you have when you are snorkeling and scuba diving in Lagoa Misteriosa.

• 15:12Speaker 06

  You can always in your mind think there may be a shark or something gonna come from the deep or from behind me or something like that. But in the lagoon, there is no, not such things like that, right?

• 15:26Speaker 05

  So it has only small fish, small snakes, like aquatic snakes.

• 15:34Ben Brock Johnson?

  Snakes in the lake.

• 15:35Amory Sivertson?

  Just some small ones.

• 15:38Speaker 05

  There's also a small type of medusa, but I'm not forgetting the name of jellyfish.

• 15:45Ben Brock Johnson?

  Don't like the sound of that.

• 15:46Amory Sivertson?

  Oh, it gets worse.

• 15:48Speaker 05

  Sometimes alligators and anacondas have already appeared. But they appear and they, and they disappear.

• 15:58Ben Brock Johnson?

  So this is just like a funnel for creatures that you don't want to share water space with into a water space that then you get into?

• 16:07Amory Sivertson?

  Yes, and what's crazy is the creatures presumably are mostly in the shallow part, right? Like anacondas, for better or worse, those are shallow water creatures.

• 16:18Ben Brock Johnson?

  I don't know, anacondas don't want none unless, I don't know.

• 16:22Amory Sivertson?

  Unless you've got caves, son.

• 16:27Amory Sivertson?

  So, yeah, so I'm afraid of the deep part. But now I'm also afraid of the shallow part. I can't win. But we hadn't even gotten to the deep part. And I was already clearly just, you know, not into this. But much the way that the Lasophobes lurk in a subreddit that's probably only making our phobia worse, I wanted to figuratively plumb the depths of Lagoa Misteriosa. Marcelo told me that once you go past eight meters or 26 feet deep, there's a divide.

• 16:57Speaker 06

  You have like two big, big holes.

• 17:01Speaker 05

  That descend and form into this dark blue bottom.

• 17:05Speaker 06

  So you can either go down in one hole or on this other hole. And they meet in about 50 meters. So you can like dive down one hole, go to 50 meters, traverse the separation between them and go up on the other hole.

• 17:27Amory Sivertson?

  Where these two holes meet at 50 meters or 164 feet, that's as deep as Marcelo has gone. But that's deeper than most, Luisa told me.

• 17:38Speaker 05

  Advanced divers can go up to 30 meters. Basic divers up to 18. And for people who never scuba dived before, it's 10 meters.

• 17:50Amory Sivertson?

  Cave divers are another story. They can go down 70 meters or about 230 feet, which is as far as the map of the underbelly of Lagoa Mestriosa goes. Beyond that?

• 18:04Ben Brock Johnson?

  Mestriosa?

• 18:06Amory Sivertson?

  Exatamente. But as we know, that's not the furthest someone has gone into the dark blue abyss. Not even close.

• 18:16Ben Brock Johnson?

  When we come back, we're going deeper.

• 18:34Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questram School of Business. What gets lost when work stops looking like a nine-to-five job?

• 18:46Ben Brock Johnson?

  If I am not committing to be working with you exclusively at a particular point in time for a certain amount of time to do certain types of work, then you can't necessarily expect the employer on the other side to provide guarantees either.

• 18:59Speaker 00

  Follow Is Business Broken? wherever you get your podcasts. And stick around until the end of this podcast for a preview of a recent episode about the changing dynamics of the gig economy.

• 19:15Speaker 01

  Fall never arrives all at once. Burst the air, then the light. And slowly, the things you love begin to find each other. A jacket meets a dress, a hoodie slips beneath a blazer, an old cap finds a new scarf. Because you don't simply step into the season, you create it, layer by layer, until it finally feels like fall. Find fall your way at Ross.

• 19:42Speaker 07

  Kayak searches and compares hundreds of travel sites. But unless I repeat the word kayak, Kayak thinks you won't remember that. So Kayak asked me to say kayak as many times as possible. Kayak! Kayak. Kayak. Kayak. Kayak, kayak, kayak. Kayak! Search and compare travel deals with Kayak. Got that right.

• 20:05Amory Sivertson?

  Like you do when you find something on the internet that creeps you the hell out, we're doing a deep dive on a deep dive.

• 20:14Ben Brock Johnson?

  In this case, the deepest anyone has ever gone into Lagoa Misteriosa, a seemingly bottomless lake at the bottom of a sinkhole in the middle of Brazil. What lies below?

• 20:26Amory Sivertson?

  I personally do not want to know.

• 20:28Ben Brock Johnson?

  Oh.

• 20:29Amory Sivertson?

  And not just because I'm worried there's some sort of bloodthirsty creature, like in the movie Underwater.

• 20:37Ben Brock Johnson?

  Or maybe a submerged haunted house with murderous paranormal beings, like in The Deep House?

• 20:49Amory Sivertson?

  You know, my deepest fears are usually a little more realistic in nature, that I might plummet to the depths, maybe surrounded by sharks, like in 47 meters down, where they're trapped and slowly running out of air.

• 21:15Amory Sivertson?

  So you're obviously a swimmer.

• 21:16Ben Brock Johnson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 21:17Amory Sivertson?

  Have you gone scuba diving before?

• 21:20Ben Brock Johnson?

  I have not. I love the water. I love exploring. But I like to experience the water as unmediated as possible. I think I'm past my skinny dipping days. But the most equipment I'm dawning for a swim would probably be a snorkel and goggles. What about you?

• 21:37Amory Sivertson?

  Oh, no. Hell, no. It's a giant conceptual no from me. But before working on this episode, I don't think I realized just how many things can go wrong. And subsequently, how much training it takes.

• 21:52Speaker 06

  I did a lot of courses, scuba courses, like with different gas mixes, with cave diving courses, a lot of underwater training.

• 22:04Ben Brock Johnson?

  I am a little bit obsessed with these scary water survival stories. And I do somewhat understand the complexities of the equipment, the pressure, the biology involved. So I'm picking up what Marcelo's putting down here.

• 22:16Amory Sivertson?

  Hmm. Yeah, that was Marcelo Kraus again, experienced diver and underwater photographer.

• 22:21Speaker 06

  If I'm in the lagoon at 10 meters, 20 meters deep, and there's a problem with my equipment, I can swim to the surface and breathe air. But if you are like in a cave, and you are really into the cave, you just cannot go to surface and breathe, you know? You need to swim back a lot to the entrance of the cave. And if you don't have special training and gas management, you can have problems with that.

• 22:55Amory Sivertson?

  And even if you do have all sorts of special training and experience, deep diving into caves is risky.

• 23:02Speaker 06

  I had no expectation of breaking the world record for depths. The aim was to explore.

• 23:10Amory Sivertson?

  Ben, this is Dave Shaw.

• 23:12Ben Brock Johnson?

  Endless Thread editor Dave Shaw. Dave, you sound different.

• 23:16Amory Sivertson?

  It's Australian diver Dave Shaw in a clip from a documentary where he's talking about a dive in South Africa in 2004, in which he broke several records, going 270 meters deep. And when he was down there, he found something.

• 23:32Speaker 06

  When I looked across to the left, that's when I saw the body that had been lost 10 years earlier.

• 23:41Amory Sivertson?

  The body of another cave diver. Dave Shaw went back a few months later to try to retrieve the body. But he himself died in the process from respiratory issues.

• 23:53Ben Brock Johnson?

  Whoa. So the voice we just heard is the voice of someone who's with us no longer.

• 23:58Amory Sivertson?

  The late Dave Shaw. Are you familiar at all with the gas mixtures that Marcelo was talking about?

• 24:05Ben Brock Johnson?

  I mean, we breathe oxygen. And when you have a scuba tank, you've got this tank, it's got oxygen in it, it has nitrogen in it. If you're diving deep, it also has helium in it. But if the gas mix of the tank gets off in combination with the pressure of the water that you're in, that can be a really big issue. So the nitrogen mix can mess with your head. And it can make you really confused. It can make you make bad decisions in high-stakes scenarios underwater, when you have to be really, like, smart about what you're doing. And that can be a huge issue.

• 24:42Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah. And eventually, you can just blackout.

• 24:48Amory Sivertson?

  That documentary is named for what Dave's diving partner that day, Don, wrote on a little slate that he sent up to the surface.

• 24:56Speaker 02

  Fonseca.

• 25:01Amory Sivertson?

  Dave not coming back. Dozens of people have died underwater cave diving. Just earlier this year, in the Maldives, five research divers died in a single incident.

• 25:14Speaker 07

  Rescue crews in the Maldives are searching for the bodies of Italian tourists who died while scuba diving in a cave there. Italy's foreign minister says...

• 25:24Amory Sivertson?

  These deep dives, when they go well, take hours. Which, on the one hand, makes sense. But what I didn't know is, it's not the descent that takes so long. That takes minutes. It's coming back up.

• 25:38Speaker 06

  We cannot go directly to the surface. You need to do what we call deco stops.

• 25:43Amory Sivertson?

  Deco stops, or decompression stops. Because if you ascend too quickly, Marcelo says...

• 25:50Speaker 06

  You get something. I think in English it's called the bends.

• 25:54Amory Sivertson?

  The bends. Ben, have you heard of the bends?

• 26:00Ben Brock Johnson?

  You mean the fourth best Radiohead record? Yeah, I've heard of it. Yeah, the way I understand the bends is if you come from down deep in the water up to the surface too fast, that pressure change in the ocean or the deep water can really create problems for your body. Because your body is really good at adjusting, but only if your body moves slowly through the strata of water. And if it doesn't move slowly enough, you can get these life-threatening cramps, because your body's been all sort of like tangled up by the pressure changes.

• 26:33Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah, it's like, there's actually little bubbles that form in your body under the pressure. So you have to, you have to keep stopping at certain points to flush the gases that build up those bubbles in your body.

• 26:47Ben Brock Johnson?

  And they call it the bends because your body contorts when you have the bends.

• 26:52Speaker 06

  The guy that tried to reach the bottom of Lagoa Misteriosa, he spent like, I think, seven or eight hours on his way back, just doing the stops so he could get to the surface safely.

• 27:07Speaker 05

  Gilberto de Menezes Oliveira, the diver, a very famous exploration diver.

• 27:14Speaker 06

  He broke records all around Brazil, you know, for deep diving in caves.

• 27:19Amory Sivertson?

  A third of the deepest underwater cave dives done before the year 2000, anywhere in the world, were done by Gilberto de Menezes de Oliveira, including, of course, Lagoa Misteriosa.

• 27:32Speaker 05

  He reached 220 meters, and he found no bottom.

• 27:39Amory Sivertson?

  Luisa Quilio again, Lagoa Misteriosa's owner and steward. Gilberto did this record-setting dive in 1998. But he'd been studying the lagoon for a few years before that. And he's actually responsible for much of what we do know about the underwater geography of this mysterious lagoon.

• 28:00Speaker 05

  There's this, like, draft that Gilberto, the diver, went 220 deep. But it's a cave, so it has like all this shape of tunnels and ducts.

• 28:14Amory Sivertson?

  And that's why it's so hard, or maybe impossible, to know exactly how deep it is.

• 28:19Speaker 05

  Yes, that's it. Because it goes on these tunnels that go like connecting and going down.

• 28:28Amory Sivertson?

  So Ben, I want you to take a look at this map that the diver Gilberto helped make.

• 28:34Ben Brock Johnson?

  So there's like a cross section of the hole. It's sort of an oval shape, so there's like rock in the middle of it somehow. Or there are these two different passageways that go down and then they meet up again. And then there's kind of like a turnoff that you can go down that's really skinny. And then it has its own sort of pathway.

• 28:56Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah, there's like an offshoot cave from one of the main branches of the cave.

• 29:01Ben Brock Johnson?

  And it's just, I don't know, you can sort of imagine swimming through this and it getting really spooky. But what's striking about this is that it's incomplete. Like the map of the cave, the bodies of water go all the way down and then they go off the map because I guess the bottom has never been discovered.

• 29:25Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah, and the idea of descending into a just dark abyss where you need all this equipment and you need a gas mixture to keep you alive and you have to execute things just so. I just cannot understand the appeal of that. I don't even like watching like real videos of people doing these dives because I'm afraid something's gonna like jump out at them or they're gonna drown. It's like a horror movie to me. But Marcelo stressed that diving and cave diving are not the same thing. Diving, that's his jam.

• 30:04Speaker 06

  You can go all around the world. You see beautiful fishes, coral reefs, marine life. And that's what I think is most interesting to me. You can see big animals, small animals, colorful, really different things. And cave diving, usually there is nothing inside a cave. Sometimes there is like small vertebrates, small blind fish or something like that. But 90% of the time you don't see anything alive. But in many caves, you see a really nice rock formations.

• 30:41Amory Sivertson?

  Oh yeah, like stalactites and stalagmites?

• 30:43Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, that's right.

• 30:45Amory Sivertson?

  Now, even though I don't want to watch people diving in deep underwater caves, I do want to hear about it, especially the caves of Lagoa Misteriosa. But the diver who's really explored them, Gilberto Menezes de Oliveira?

• 31:01Speaker 06

  I think he stopped diving a long time ago. Maybe 20, 20 something years ago, he stopped doing this crazy stuff.

• 31:11Amory Sivertson?

  Marcelo doesn't know if Gilberto is even still alive. He sent a message out to his diving community in Brazil and no one has been in contact with him in many years. Not even Luisa, who shared an email address from 2011 with me, but the message I sent to him bounced back. Luisa and Marcelo also told me that even when Gilberto was actively diving, he didn't do interviews. And sure enough, I can't find a single one with him. He doesn't have any social media.

• 31:41Ben Brock Johnson?

  He's as mysterious as the Lagoa itself.

• 31:47Ben Brock Johnson?

  Here's a question. What if there is no bottom to Lagoa Misteriosa? What if it goes straight to the, what do they call it? The crust? Straight through the crust? Straight to the magma? The bottom is magma. The floor is lava and the bottom of Lagoa Misteriosa is also lava.

• 32:07Amory Sivertson?

  Well, I have been wondering about this because when it comes to cenotes, like you mentioned in the Yucatan in Mexico, some of those are a lot better mapped than the Lagoa is. And cave divers have found that a lot of cenotes are connected to each other through this like intricate network of tunnels. So what if the bottom of Lagoa Misteriosa is not actually a bottom, but it's an offshoot tunnel to another cave at the bottom of another sinkhole? You know, like, like a network of tree roots, how they just kind of keep connecting to each other.

• 32:46Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, hand me the mask, man. I'm, I'm down. I want to go down to the bottom and take a left and see where it comes back up.

• 32:55Amory Sivertson?

  I did ask Luisa, though, if anyone else has tried to find the bottom of Lagoa Misteriosa.

• 33:01Speaker 05

  Since Gilberto reached 220, we had no more attempts.

• 33:06Amory Sivertson?

  Do you hope that the, that the depth is someday found out?

• 33:11Speaker 06

  I think it will, yeah, eventually, yes.

• 33:14Amory Sivertson?

  You do?

• 33:15Speaker 06

  Yeah. I don't know if a diver will go there, but you can, you know, send like a robot there with a long cable and try to find the bottom.

• 33:25Speaker 05

  We already received proposals for sending like robots, but we declined the proposals because there's the risk of the robot damaging the, the cave and of getting, of being lost. It's, it's like a tricky thing, right?

• 33:44Amory Sivertson?

  A tricky thing because as I mentioned, Luisa is an environmental engineer who runs an ecotourism business. Her family chose to have Lagoa Misteriosa designated as an official private reserve in Brazil's park system.

• 33:59Speaker 05

  Like a national park. So my children now have the obligation of to keep Lagoa Misteriosa intact.

• 34:08Amory Sivertson?

  So Luisa doesn't want to do anything that could potentially damage the cave or litter it with a lost robot. And sure, maybe they could send like a tiny drone submarine down there, but technology and communication signals, much like the human body, don't fare that well under extreme pressure and depth. But there is another reason Luisa isn't keen on efforts to find the bottom of the Lagoa these days.

• 34:35Speaker 05

  The mystery also is not knowing the bottom, right? So that's the mystery of Lagoa Misteriosa.

• 34:44Ben Brock Johnson?

  Hmm, yeah, it sounds like maybe solving the mystery might actually cost her some business.

• 34:51Amory Sivertson?

  You know, it might, but I think if you're really like a, you really want to see the crystalline waters and the, the fish and the, the anacondas, I don't know, the bottom might not matter to you so much. But there is one mystery I think Luisa would be willing to have solved.

• 35:13Speaker 05

  How does the anaconda descend a sinkhole and it reaches the Lagoa? So that's a mystery also, right? Like how the anaconda gets down the sinkhole, like sliding through the rocks? Yeah, that's also a mystery.

• 35:29Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, I'm not so into the anaconda part of the mystery. I don't want to know. I don't want to get close enough to find out.

• 35:36Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah, it turns out the crystalline waters just make it easier to see the giant snakes.

• 35:42Ben Brock Johnson?

  No bottomless Lagoas for us. I guess we're just gonna have to stick to going to the tops of tall buildings.

• 35:48Amory Sivertson?

  Or maybe not.

• 36:09Ben Brock Johnson?

  And this is maybe a little TMI, but I will say that this is, when I look over the edge of this thing towards you, this is the kind of thing that makes your loins tingle and not like in a good way.

• 36:23Ben Brock Johnson?

  If that makes any sense.

• 36:25Amory Sivertson?

  Just so everybody knows how Ben's loins are doing right now. Thank you for that.

• 36:31Ben Brock Johnson?

  Tingling and not in a good way.

• 36:43Amory Sivertson?

  Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. This episode was written and produced by me, Amory Sivertson.

• 36:49Ben Brock Johnson?

  Amory and me, Ben Brock Johnson, co-hosted this episode.

• 36:53Amory Sivertson?

  Mix and sound design by our production manager, Paul Vikes. Editing by Dave Shaw, who has promised us he will not go deep diving into caves. Thank you, Dave. The rest of our team is Emily Jankowski, Dean Russell, Grace Tatter, Franny Monahan, and our senior managing producer, Samantha Joshi.

• 37:09Ben Brock Johnson?

  Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between online communities and swimming with my anaconda don't want none unless your lake has a bottom, son.

• 37:20Amory Sivertson?

  If you have an untold history, an unsolved mystery, or some other wild story from the internet that you want us to tell, a cave you want us to plumb the depths of, well, I won't, but we will read your email, so send it to [email protected].

• 37:49Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questram School of Business. Follow Is Business Broken? wherever you get your podcasts and listen on for a preview of a recent episode featuring Brandeis University Professor David Weil on a question at the heart of the gig economy. When an app controls how you work, is it really just a platform or is it your employer?

• 38:15Speaker 07

  It is very true that the platforms allow, let's say, drivers to find riders much more easily in a way that would be impossible absent the Uber or Lyft technology. Yes, the technology is connecting people, but the technology is also doing all the kinds of things that we usually associate with management. Setting the rate of pay, setting the pace of work, deciding on who gets the job and who doesn't, monitoring the performance of that party. There's a lot that these technologies do that are all about what we would call management.

• 38:56Speaker 00

  Find the full episode by searching for Is Business Broken? wherever you get your podcasts and learn more about the Marotra Institute for Business, Markets, and Society at ibms.bu.edu.

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