Bermuda?s underwater caves may contain the most precious elements of Bermuda?s eco-system, and yet few Bermudians will ever get a chance to see them.

Now, a group of Bermuda?s top science students can count themselves amongst the lucky.

Twenty-five students from Berkeley Institute recently took part in a Bermuda cave mapping project being conducted by the Cambrian Foundation, an American cave conservation and research organisation.

While the students onsite watched a live broadcast of a dive into Cliffpool in Hamilton Parish, more students watched at CedarBridge Academy. The event was something like the annual Jason Project in that students had a chance to ask questions of the divers and scientists while they were underwater.

The Cambrian divers used a patented human remote operated vehicle (ROV) system which allowed a live video broadcast, verbal communication with people on the surface and tracking.

Dr. Anne Glasspool of the Bermuda Biodiversity Programme said the Cambrian Foundation was invited to Bermuda because of their unique education and outreach mission and also because of their sophisticated ROV equipment.

?It was an opportunity to get kids involved,? she said.

Students were picked by their teachers because they showed an interest in science or had good science grades.

?I enjoyed the programme,? said Ashauntae Harvey-Hollis, 16. ?It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I would like to do it again. We were chosen by our teachers. I am particularly into science. I did the Nonsuch Island camp this summer and I really enjoyed it. I prefer environmental sciences. I like being in the outdoors and observing what I see. I hadn?t ever thought about what goes on in caves before I did this.?

Another student, Peter McGlashan, 16, also said he was excited by the cave exploration.

?I like physics and things like that,? he said. ?I had been interested in diving in caves before this.?

During the live broadcast the students were very well behaved and asked intelligent questions.

One person asked: ?How do you culture bacteria underwater. How do you get a sample??

Amy Giannotti, director of the venture and President of the Cambrian foundation, said: ?That?s a great question. If you think about when you culture above water you spread it on a material that looks like jello. If you didn?t solidify that, you could actually grow your bacteria in a liquid culture in a flask. We take cave water and filter out all the micro-organisms that are in it. Then we add a little bit of sulphur and then we inoculate by taking our swab and swishing it around in there. Then we wait for it to grow in the liquid media.

?If it is an environment where there is a lot of flow, then we shake it to mimic the temperature conditions and the light and the incubation conditions.?

The student visit also seemed to work at other levels, besides the scientific. One student expressed surprise and curiosity that the scientists were volunteers. Clearly, the idea of working for joy was a new one.

?How does it affect your life to be volunteering?? he asked.

Dr. Giannotti said it was a serious commitment and a sacrifice.

?I have a three-year-old daughter and a five-month-old at home,? she said. ?I have been planning this project for about three years. A few months ago I shipped 400 pounds of equipment to Bermuda. I haven?t seen my living room floor for about a month. It is very nice when you have a job that will allow you to break away and do something you are passionate about.

?I am a former high school science teacher. I ended up bringing my students on an expedition a couple of years ago. After that, I was like ?this is great?, to be able to teach kids in the field and have them participate as research assistants.?

The long-term effects of littering were also brought home when divers deep in the cave began to come across common household garbage.

?Sink holes and caves are unfortunately a dumping ground for a lot of trash,? said Dr. Giannotti. ?People have that out of sight, out of mind philosophy. We have pulled out everything from sofas to Christmas trees to bikes to engines. There is one cave on your Island that has about 500 oil drums. The organisms in caves, some of them endemic to Bermuda, are already living in a very critical state where there is very little food. Any disruption to that, for their environment can be detrimental.?

Dr. Giannotti also brought home to the students, the importance of being properly trained before going into underwater caves. Cave diving can be extremely dangerous.

?A few minutes ago you saw a mirrored thing on the screen, that is an air bubble,? said Dr. Giannotti. ?If you are ever snorkelling around here, and have an urge to poke your head in a cave, lots of people are mistakenly hurt, by thinking that those air bubbles are safe to breathe or provide enough air.

?Don?t attempt to breathe them. You could end up in a serious situation. You wouldn?t make it. There is usually not enough air and sometimes that bubble contains hydrogen sulfide, a bi-product of bacterial decomposition.?

The Cambrian Foundation is the only civilian organisation that has a reciprocity agreement with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). That means that divers from NOAA and divers from the Cambrian Foundation can dive on each other?s projects.

?Because of that, we maintain the same standards for everything from our equipment to our dive locker back home to emergency evacuation procedures,? said Dr. Giannotti. ?The first day we arrived in Bermuda we actually did an emergency evacuation drill from the cavern here. We put the person on oxygen, took them to the hospital. We toured the recompression chamber and met the staff. We have pretty strict standards in place.

?Bermuda has a great facility at the hospital. If you are scuba diving and get bent or have a problem and need to come to the recompression chamber, you should feel very good about the quality of care you get.?

Many of the Cambrian Foundation divers are used to diving in caves in Mexico and Florida. There are several differences between Bermuda caves and caves in these places.

?The main difference is that in Bermuda you have a really silty system,? said Dr. Giannotti. ?Just a small kick from a fin can kick up enough silt so that they lose all visibility. So what you see going is four people down there who are hovering very still, not moving very much or kicking their fins very much, because in an instant they could black out the screen for the next day. In Florida, our caves have a lot more flow, so it is like sticking your head in a firehose and when you do kick up silt it clears pretty quickly.

?The silt is very important because it contains a lot of organic matter such as decomposed vegetation and things like that.?

The student visit was part of a larger two-week event to begin to map the Greenbay Cave System, which includes Cliffpool Cave.

?We ultimately want to map the entire cave system so that we have some idea how extensive it is,? said Dr. Glasspool. ?If someone wants to put a cesspit into their garden or there is a new house going up, at the moment we have no idea where these caves go. If we can come up with a relatively accurate map of the cave system (that would illuminate the situation). That is one of their specialities of sending teams of divers out to help.?

It is thought that the Greenbay system of caves is a separate system from the Walsingham cave system, but they aren?t sure.

?We may one day find that they link up, you never know,? said Dr. Glasspool.

One of the scientists, Jennifer Cate, was studying pollutants in the caves and their effects on the outside environment.

?The theory is that Bermuda is so littered with caves, everything goes into the caves,? she said. ?The caves are tidally influenced, the tide takes out the pollutants and it gets flushed out into the seagrasses and corals.

?The seagrasses and corals are noticeably getting degraded, so we are looking at caves to see if those are the things that are transmitting the pollutants. If the problem is coming from the caves, then where are the pollutants coming from and how can we stop it? Maybe we could help out with a waste management programme.?

Miss Cate will be in Bermuda all next summer carrying out her research. She is looking for a student to volunteer their assistance. Many of the Berkeley student participants showed interest in helping her.