Richard Branson Is Going To Live Stream Himself Taking A Submarine To The Center Of The Earth

Source - It looks, at first, like a giant, flat, ink blot in the sea, but underneath this sinkhole – the largest in the world – is a cavern large enough to swallow two Boeing 747s with room to spare.

Now, in the first mission of its kind, Cousteau’s grandson and Sir Richard Branson are plunging to the deep, dark bottom of it in a submarine as part of an expedition that will be streamed live and broadcasted globally on the Discovery Channel.

This will be quite a feat. Scuba divers generally only descend to a maximum of 130 feet underwater, so what lies beneath that remains largely uncharted territory, and there’s a lot of it. 

Branson and Fabien Cousteau will join Aquatica Submarines’ chief pilot Erika Bergman and make several expeditions into the sinkhole this weekend in a remote-piloted Stingray 500 submarine, to collect data and map out the submerged cave.

The Great Blue Hole was measured by scientists using sonar technology in 1997, but this will be the first since then and by far the most thorough exploration.

Bergman’s team hope to gather scientific data on marine aspects including water quality and bacterial activity, as well to attain high-resolution footage and a detailed plan of the Hole’s internal structure for the first time.

The broadcast will be live on the Discovery Channel from 9–11pm on Sunday, December 2, and Richard Branson will be speaking to Telegraph Travel about what the team unearths next week.

If I were a billionaire, I’d be Richard Branson. Forget the fame, forget the fortune, just build me a fortress on a Caribbean island and leave me the fuck alone. Think about how full of a life this guy has lived. He’s owned a record label, an airline, railroads, media companies, he’s written books, given speeches, he’s been knighted, AND he’s become a multi multi billionaire in the process. He’s literally done it all. The only thing left to do is submerge a submarine into this thing.

“The Great Blue Hole” off the coast of Belize. No one’s ever gone deeper than one-hundred and thirty feet, so I guess he feels the need to break that record in order to get some hi-def hole footage. (Ahh-thankyou.) Kind of weird, but I get why he’s doing it- Deep Ocean was an all-time Planet Earth episode.

The coolest part of the whole thing is that he’s going to live stream it on Discovery Channel. Meaning if the walls of the submersible collapse under the pressure of the ocean, Richard will be crushed to death on camera. To be honest, I kind of want some drama. Every time one of these stunts go off without a hitch I’m disappointed. Hopefully he finds what he’s looking for otherwise the whole thing will be a gigantic waste of time. Whatever. Best of luck, Sir Branson.