In 1905 , a 13 - year - older male child was playing in a cave in Craighead Caverns , a giant organization of caves in between Sweetwater and Madisonville , Tennessee , as he often did , when he stumbled across an unexplored opening night and extort his way through .
The caves themselves had beenknown aboutsince the time of the Cherokee , the autochthonous people of the Southeastern Woodlands of the United States . Artifacts including pottery , jewellery , arrowhead , and weapons have been find inside a chamber known as " the council elbow room " , itself nearly a mile from the cave system ’s entry . In the 1800s , colonizer from Europe also found the caves , using the cool environs to hive away spud and other veg , while a Confederate soldier left a piddling graffiti – the act 1863 , torch onto a wall , likely in 1863 CE according to carbon dating .
The cave was also home to a giant Pleistocene Felis onca , which made tracks there after being lost there some 20,000 years ago , before fall and die in a crack as it tried to escape the darkness .
As far as we know , the " lost ocean " beneath the cave was not discovered until a 13 - twelvemonth - sure-enough grovel through a hole in the wall , and made the find of a life-time .
" The lake was discovered by Ben Sands , " Craighead Caverns tour manoeuvre Savannah Dalton toldCBS Newsin 2019 . " A 13 - year - old boy who had actually crawl through a burrow that was the size of it of a bicycle tyre for 40 feet before he dropped down into the lake itself and really waded out into about articulatio genus - thick water . It was a lot smaller when he came through . But we ’ve blasted it out since . "
Sands found himself inside a gigantic elbow room half - fill with water system , with a torch not sinewy enough to see the other side . In the room , which had perhaps never been seen by human eye before , he began throwing mudballs in every direction he could , but heard nothing but the splash as they fell into the water .
The area where Sands first fall into is now home to around 300 rainbow trout . These fauna were not native to the cave , and had n’t survived hack off from the rest of the world , but were inaugurate after the cave ’s find . The Bob Hope was that by pose the trout into the lake , they may miss andreveal entrancesto other field of the lake . With no food supply , they learned towait for their foodfrom waterman arriving with some of the 150,000 tourist a yr who opt to visit the cave .
" They ’re down here long enough that they do lose a small-scale part of both their eyesight and their color,“Dalton bring . " The ignition of class is not instinctive sun , so they ca n’t really maintain that pigment . "
That part of the lake has now been explore a little better , and we now have intercourse it is around 243 meters(800 feet ) long by 67 meters ( 220 foot ) wide . But that is the part of the lake which we can see . Underwater , the lake conduct off to other hall . underwater diver have explored some areas of the lake , and map over 13 Acre ( 5.2 hectares ) of H2O , but still have not found the lake ’s end . In fact , theNational Natural Landmarkis thoughtto be thelargest belowground lakein North America .
