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Searching The Maya Underworld

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Three hundred feet down, in total darkness, a dive team found Ice Age bear bones waiting at the bottom of a Mexican sinkhole.

GoPro’s “Yab Yum” closes out the three-part web series Searching The Maya Underworld: Quest for the Earth’s Biggest Cave, released in December 2016 and shot entirely on HERO4 cameras. Veteran cave diver Robbie Schmittner leads the crew into Yab Yum, a colossal sinkhole cut into the limestone of the Yucatán Peninsula near Tulum — one of the largest and deepest diveable pits in a region riddled with them. Underwater archaeologist Guillermo de Anda and archaeologist Dante García join the descent to survey what’s sitting on the chamber floor.

• Yab Yum plunges toward 90 meters — nearly 300 feet — making it one of the deepest diveable underwater sinkhole chambers in the Yucatán’s cave systems.
• At the bottom, the team recovers fossilized Ice Age bear remains along with other prehistoric geological and paleontological material preserved beneath the water table.
• The dive is framed as part of a larger search for the passages linking the giant Sac Actun and Dos Ojos cave networks, and as an archaeological inquiry into Xibalba, the Maya underworld tied to death, water, and transformation.

Dropping Into the Pit

Yab Yum isn’t a typical cenote dive. The chamber is deep enough and wide enough that Schmittner’s team relies on diver propulsion vehicles — underwater scooters — to cover ground that would otherwise burn through tank time and bottom time long before divers reached the floor. The walls are lined with dense stalactite and stalagmite formations, and the water itself splits into visible layers, with a tannic, tea-colored band sitting above clearer water below — a signature of these Yucatán sinkholes where fresh water and mineral-stained runoff settle at different depths rather than mixing.

Getting a full survey team to the bottom of a pit that size, in near-zero visibility once silt gets kicked up, is the kind of technical dive that separates recreational cave diving from the specialized work Schmittner’s crew does for a living. It’s the same appeal that pulls divers toward comparable formations elsewhere, like the sinkholes drawing technical divers to South Australian farmland — massive, vertical, and unforgiving if the gear or the plan fails.

Yab Yum drops toward 90 meters — nearly 300 feet below the jungle floor.

Items Found on the Floor

Once de Anda and García reach the bottom with the dive crew, the survey turns up fossilized bear remains dating to the Ice Age, alongside other prehistoric geological and paleontological material that’s been locked beneath the water table for millennia. That preservation is the whole reason these flooded caves matter to researchers: when sea levels rose at the end of the last Ice Age and swallowed the cave systems, they sealed off chambers like Yab Yum from the surface world, leaving bones and formations essentially undisturbed until a diver’s light finds them.

For de Anda, whose work across the Yucatán has centered on documenting exactly this kind of submerged record, Yab Yum’s floor is treated less like a curiosity and more like an undisturbed archive — one that ties directly into the region’s dual identity as both a paleontological time capsule and, in Maya belief, a physical gateway to Xibalba.

Chasing the Connection Between Sac Actun and Dos Ojos

The larger goal running through all three parts of the series is mapping how far these systems actually stretch. Schmittner’s dives into Yab Yum are part of an effort to trace passages that link Sac Actun and Dos Ojos, two of the biggest named cave networks in the Yucatán. Archaeologists working in this same corridor had already documented Sac Actun as a flooded system running over 350 kilometers (217 miles), and confirming whether it connects into Dos Ojos was the kind of find that would redraw the map of the world’s largest known underwater cave system.

That’s the throughline of “Yab Yum” as a closing chapter: it’s not just a dive into a deep, photogenic pit. It’s one more data point in an ongoing survey of how deep, and how far, the Maya underworld actually runs beneath the jungle.

By the time this series wrapped, the connective tissue divers like Schmittner and de Anda had been chasing through pits like Yab Yum turned out to be real — Sac Actun’s passages eventually linked into Dos Ojos, stitching together roughly 347 kilometers of flooded tunnel into the single largest known underwater cave system on the planet. Yab Yum was one of the pieces that helped prove the map was bigger than anyone had charted.