“For me, I’m a geochemist,” Beckler said, “and we are trying to understand how water and rocks interact, and how the oceans on earth and the atmosphere all sort of evolved over the last four to six billion years. And when you have these crazy microenvironments like the blue holes, where it’s not just fully oxygenated like the rest of the ocean, it also serves as a potential proxy for what the earth looked like back in the day.”