This amazing woman is educated and talented too. She has a bachelors from Mississippi State University and a doctorate from the University of Bristol in England and she's raced sailboats and competed in competitive swimming. Schwabe took up cave diving about 25 years ago purely as a scientific tool. "I was finishing up my master's degree, looking at caves located above sea level," she said. "But I realized that to get the answers I was looking for, I had to go into underwater caves and see what was going on down there." She met British diving pioneer Rob Palmer and they married in the 1990s. Together they dove the Bahama "blue holes," submarine caves or flooded sinkholes named for their pristine blue water.
Schwabe has lost friends diving in caves. Her husband died on a pleasure dive in the Red Sea in 1997. Palmer had barely survived a dive in an Australian cave a few years earlier, accounts of which became the basis for the recently released movie Sanctum, produced by James Cameron of Avatar fame. Schwabe admits that she dives to further science and that understanding this fear is one thing that keeps her alive. "I think it surprises people to hear it, but I'm always afraid when I dive ... The moment you lose your fear doing this you're dead. My husband lost that fear; he'd gotten away with too much, and he became cocky. Now he's no longer with us," she said." After her husband's death, Schwabe founded the Rob Palmer Blue Holes Foundation, a non-profit that promotes scientific exploration of the blue holes.
In 2000 Schwabe made a discovery that changed the way geologists understood the Bahamas. She dove into the Black Hole on South Andros Island in the Bahamas with an Australian film crew. When she reached 50 feet below the water's surface, she saw to what appeared to be the bottom but it actually was a meter-thick layer of hot, dark purple bacteria with roughly another 100 feet of oxygen-depleted water beneath it. The bacterial layer, which persists year-round, is incredibly hot, nearly 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and contains dangerously high levels of hydrogen sulfide, a neurotoxin released by the tiny organisms. The bacteria also generates the high temperatures in the layer. Schwabe named the new bacterial species Allocromatium palmeirr in honor of her late husband. "It's like a pitch black thermal blanket," she said. "When I first reached into the layer, my hand just completely disappeared. It's very unusual."
Schwabe said she has been told that the experiences she recorded in her book have the makings of a feature film. But she says that, "after Sanctum, I don't think I'd let Hollywood have my story." While she has not watched Sanctum all the way through, she's not impressed with the movie. Scriptwriters took too many liberties and the film has little in common with actual events of the dive. Schwabe is switching focus to finance a return to full-time research. "I need to get back to doing more of what I love doing," she said. "There probably are many life forms out there that have yet to be discovered, and I'm not getting any younger. So I'd better hop to it."
SOURCE
http://infodeephorizon.blogspot.com
http://www.blueholes.org
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