Florida’s Coast COLLAPSING — Massive Sinkholes Consume Beaches as the Ground Gives Way

[00:00:00]Right now, beneath your feet, the ground you have trusted your entire life is dissolving. Not eroding, not shifting, dissolving. In Florida, beaches that existed at sunrise are gone by noon. Not washed away, not buried by storms, [music] but swallowed whole by holes 300 ft wide that opened without a single warning. 47 mi of coastline have been sealed off from the public. Scientists are detecting earthquakes in [music] a state that is not supposed to have earthquakes. And the limestone foundation holding up millions of homes, highways, and lives [music] is riddled with caverns so vast they make the ground above them essentially [music] a ceiling waiting to fall. Hi, my name is Daniel and this is natural disasters.

[00:00:41][music] The day it began, December 18th, 6:47 in the morning, Eastern Standard Time.

[00:00:47]Coast Guard patrol boat CG47 [music] is running a routine check 400 yd off Deerfield Beach. And Lieutenant Commander James Walsh radios base with coordinates [music] that make his dispatcher repeat them back twice. The depth finder is showing 40 ft of water in a location where navigational charts clearly indicate 12. That is not a measurement error. That is not equipment malfunction. Something has changed the bottom of the ocean overnight. Within 15 minutes, aerial surveillance confirms what nobody on that patrol boat [music] wants to accept. A sinkhole measuring 300 ft across has opened on the ocean floor while Florida slept. 300 ft. To put that in perspective, that is roughly the length of a football field. Gone.

[00:01:29]Just gone.

[00:01:30]>> [music] >> A void in the seafloor where solid ground existed the day before. And here is where the morning goes from alarming to catastrophic. At 7:23, a second sinkhole tears open near Pompano Beach.

[00:01:42]>> [music] >> This one measures 450 ft in diameter, larger than the first. Beach erosion becomes visible from shore as the underwater void begins pulling sand seaward [music] in real time. Tourists filming sunrise videos, and this detail stops me every time [music] I think about it. Tourists filming sunrise videos capture the exact moment [music] the beach they are standing on starts sliding toward the water. Hotel guests evacuate in pajamas, [music] literally in pajamas, grabbing children, grabbing nothing else, running as emergency sirens split the air across Broward County. [music] I want you to picture that for a second.

[00:02:16]You went to sleep in a beachfront hotel room, paradise, vacation, and you wake up to the ground eating the beach. By 8:15, a third sinkhole tears through the seafloor near Boca Raton. The Florida Department of Environmental Protection >> [music] >> escalates to full crisis mode. Director Amanda Torres begins coordinating with 15 county emergency management offices simultaneously as reports flood in faster than her teams can log them. By 9:00 in the [music] morning, beach closures begin. 47 miles of coastline from Port Everglades to Palm Beach are deemed unsafe for human access. The Broward County Sheriff's Office deploys 200 deputies. Coast Guard establishes no-go zones extending 2 miles offshore.

[00:02:58]By noon, NOAA aerial surveys reveal the full scope of what is happening beneath the surface. Not three sinkholes, not five. 23 distinct underwater sinkholes identified across 15 square miles of seafloor. 23 in one morning. Dr. Marcus Reynolds, lead [music] geologist with the United States Geological Survey, reviews the satellite data and uses [music] a phrase that will appear in every scientific briefing for the next 6 months. He calls it an [music] unprecedented collapse event, unlike anything in Florida's recorded history.

[00:03:30]The numbers in those first hours are already staggering. 12,000 tourists displaced [music] from beachfront hotels. Eight major resorts completely evacuated. [music] Emergency shelters opening across Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach. And preliminary damage estimates already exceeding $2.3 billion >> [music] >> before lunch. What is actually happening Here is the part of this story [music] that keeps geologists awake at 3:00 in the morning staring at the ceiling.

[00:03:57]Florida is not built on solid [music] ground. It never was. The entire state sits atop a porous limestone platform, a geological formation called karst [music] that has been slowly dissolving from beneath for thousands of years.

[00:04:10]Under normal circumstances, that dissolution happens gradually enough that the surface above it holds. Roads stay flat. Buildings stay standing.

[00:04:18][music] Beaches stay beaches. What is happening now is not normal circumstances. [music] Dr. Sarah Chen, lead geologist with the United States Geological Survey, explains the chemistry with the kind of measured alarm that scientists use when they are terrified but trying [music] to stay professional. Carbonic acid from rainwater combines with saltwater intrusion to create a chemical reaction that literally eats the rock. A process that normally takes centuries is now happening in months. Read that again.

[00:04:47]Centuries compressed into months. The saltwater [music] intrusion piece is critical here, and it connects directly to something larger. Sea level rise along Florida's coast is currently running at 3.2 [music] mm per year above historical averages. That saltwater is pushing further inland, further underground, reaching limestone deposits that were never designed, if we can use that word about geology, to be soaked in salt. [music] The dissolution rate has accelerated 40% faster than any data from the 20th [music] century. And then, there are the temperature fluctuations.

[00:05:20]As the climate system reorganizes itself, the cycles of expansion and contraction in already compromised rock are fracturing it further. Every hot day followed by a cool night, every warm winter followed by a cold snap. Each cycle cracks the foundation a little more. The result, as revealed by emergency sonar [music] mapping conducted in the days following the first collapse, is something that makes every engineer who looks at it go quiet for a moment before they start talking.

[00:05:47]A massive [music] interconnected cavern network stretching from Miami to Jupiter, Florida. Some [music] chambers measuring 200 ft tall, extending for miles through the subsurface. Hidden entirely beneath communities that went to sleep every night with no idea what was under them. The University of Florida [music] research team, led by Dr. James Martinez, models the three-dimensional structure and uses a comparison that I think is the most [music] effective way to understand what Florida is sitting on right now. He says the limestone foundation resembles Swiss cheese, hollowed out, structurally compromised across hundreds of square miles. Think about that the next time you are driving down I-95. The [music] current collapse rate as of the initial crisis average 12 sinkholes forming per week. Historical data shows Florida average two to three sinkholes per year, statewide, across [music] the entire state. In the latter half of the 20th century, we have gone from two or three per year to 12 per week. That is not a trend line.

[00:06:45]>> [music] >> That is a cliff. Dr. Lisa Wong at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography describes the convergence of stressors, [music] sea level rise, salt water intrusion, temperature cycles, increased rainfall, as a perfect storm for geological failure. Multiple independent factors all pushing in the same direction at the same time. And monitoring stations along [music] the coast begin detecting something that genuinely unnerves the scientists reviewing the data, acoustic anomalies, the sounds of rock fracturing underwater in real time. You can hear the ground breaking. Nature is broadcasting exactly what it is doing, and the signal is not subtle. The debate within the research community about what is driving this acceleration, whether it is primarily climate-induced [music] or connected to El Nino cycle intensification, matters less right now than the point in which every research team agrees without reservation. The collapses are accelerating faster than anyone predicted. The models were wrong.

[00:07:43][music] The ground is going. The tar balls, nature's alarm system. I want to pause here and tell you about the tar balls because this detail is the one that shifted this [music] story from a geological crisis into something that genuinely sent chills [music] through the scientific community. December 18th, 7:15 in the morning. Lifeguard Marcus Johnson arrives [music] for his shift at Deerfield Beach and finds the sand coated in thick, sticky, black clumps stretching as far as he can see in both directions. [music] His first assumption, everyone's first assumption, is an oil spill, a tanker leak, something conventional and terrible, but at least explainable. Within 6 hours, that explanation is off the table. The Florida Department of Environmental Protection runs chemical analysis on the samples and rules out petroleum contamination. This is not oil. [music] This is something else. Dr. Angela Martinez, a marine geologist at the University of [music] Miami, examines the samples under electron microscopy and makes a discovery that, in her words, sends shock waves through the scientific community. The tar balls contain ancient organic material trapped in limestone [music] for millennia.

[00:08:52]Carbon dating reveals that the material ranges from 15,000 to 50,000 years old.

[00:08:58]50,000 [music] years. This material was sealed in bedrock during the last ice age. It has not seen sunlight [music] since before modern humans existed in the Americas, and it is now washing up on a beach in Broward [music] County because the seafloor collapsed and exposed rock layers that were never supposed to be disturbed. 2,400 lb of it [music] spread across a 12-mi stretch of coastline. But here is what truly alarms the research teams. The tar balls are not randomly [music] distributed. When scientists overlay the tar ball locations against the maps of the underground cavern network, the match is almost perfect.

[00:09:33]Every significant deposit of ancient material appearing on the surface that's directly above a known or suspected [music] collapse zone. The earth is marking its own fault lines. It is leaving a trail and then the methane readings come in. Monitoring equipment deployed across the collapse zones [music] begins detecting methane spikes in several locations. Methane rising through fractured limestone from deposits that were sealed for tens of thousands of years. The implications of methane presence alongside [music] collapsing seafloor are serious enough that Dr. Martinez's team issues a supplementary hazard [music] warning that goes beyond the sinkhole crisis itself. The environmental damage cascades [music] quickly. 47 sea turtles show signs of tar ingestion. 12 dolphins exhibit respiratory distress. Marine mammal rescue centers become overwhelmed within 48 hours. Kelp [music] and seagrass beds suffocate under the sediment and ancient organic material pouring into the water column. Dr. Martinez puts [music] it as plainly as science allows. If material buried for 50,000 years [music] is surfacing now, the question of what else the collapsing foundation might release does not have a comfortable answer. The human cost numbers are how we measure disasters.

[00:10:46]People are how we understand them. Maria Martinez, and [music] yes, half the scientists in this story are also named Martinez. Florida is a place. Maria Martinez stands outside her family restaurant in Pompano Beach on the morning of December 18th holding her 8-year-old [music] daughter Sophia's hand. For 18 years that beachfront property represented three generations of family investment. Her grandmother's savings, [music] her parents' labor, her own decade and a half of 6-day weeks and double shifts.

[00:11:15]The building inspector arrives at 9:47 in the morning. The foundation [music] has cracked overnight. The cracks spread across the walls like spider webs. The verdict is immediate. Compromised due to ground subsidence. Evacuate immediately.

[00:11:29]Maria takes three suitcases and the family photos. The restaurant, valued at $2.8 million, carries insurance that specifically [music] excludes ground collapse. Sophia cries as they drive away. "When can we go home, Mama?" I do not have a joke for that one. I am sorry. 40 mi north, 68-year-old Sarah Thompson [music] has lived in the Big Sur. Wait, wrong disaster. I keep these stories running together in my head after weeks [music] of research. Sarah Thompson has lived on Florida's coast for four decades. Her home disappears under 20 ft of debris in less than 3 [music] minutes. She escapes with her two dogs. Everything she built over 40 years is gone. She tells emergency responders it was all she had in the world. The evacuation shelters fill at a rate that staggers the Red Cross volunteers staffing [music] them.

[00:12:15]Ocean View Towers, a 22-story building housing 340 residents, receives a mandatory evacuation order at 11:47 at night after [music] emergency foundation inspections detect movement. Residents are given 2 [music] hours to pack essentials. Elderly residents requiring medical assistance navigate [music] dark and stairwells as elevators shut down for safety. Emergency shelters hit 150% in capacity [music] within hours. The Red Cross opens eight additional facilities across Brevard County. They fill immediately. What the data does not fully capture is the psychological dimension of this particular [music] disaster. Unlike a hurricane, which is terrifying, catastrophic, and real, a hurricane at least has the courtesy to announce itself. You have days of warning. You can watch it on radar. You can make a plan. A sinkhole opens while you sleep [music] and swallows the ground you were standing on. There is no warning. There is no radar. There is no plan that accounts for the earth simply deciding [music] not to be there anymore. Anxiety medication prescriptions spike 340% across coastal counties in the weeks following the initial collapse. Children wake screaming. Parents lie [music] awake listening to their houses settle, a sound that was once completely unremarkable, and wonder if that creek is normal or if they should grab the kids and go. The mayor of Fort Lauderdale faces cameras with the specific expression of a person who [music] prepared for many scenarios in their career, and not this one. "This is beyond anything we planned for," he says, "beyond anything our emergency protocols imagined possible." That is a remarkable admission, and it is an [music] honest one. Infrastructure on the edge. The ground does not only swallow [music] beaches, it swallows everything built on it. Highway A1A, >> [music] >> the coastal road that runs along Florida's eastern edge, and which, if you have ever driven it, is one of the genuinely [music] beautiful drives in America, begins showing stress fractures near Deerfield Beach that were not there 72 hours earlier. Florida Department of Transportation engineers measure 6 in of subsidence across a 3.2 mi section, [music] 6 in of drop in a road that was level 3 days ago. The roadway closes to all traffic. 45,000 daily commuters are rerouted [music] through residential neighborhoods built for local traffic.

[00:14:31]Emergency repair estimates reach $89 million, but the engineers issuing those estimates add a qualifier that makes the number [music] almost beside the point.

[00:14:40]Nobody knows if repairs will hold on ground that continues to collapse underneath them. [music] You cannot patch a road that is eating itself from below. The utility failures compound the crisis in ways that are less dramatic than a collapsing beach, but more immediately dangerous for the people living through it. Pacific [music] Gas and wait, wrong coast again. I need more sleep. Florida Power and Light reports tens of thousands of customers losing power as ground movement affects buried infrastructure. Water treatment facilities shift to backup systems.

[00:15:09][music] Sewage lines, and I will spare you the details here, but you can imagine, >> [music] >> sewage lines in areas of subsidence face potential failures that create their own category of public health emergency. The businesses not directly swallowed by the earth face an equally brutal fate.

[00:15:24]Hotels within the closure zone shut indefinitely. Restaurants lose their supply chains and their customers [music] simultaneously. Spring break bookings, and spring break is not a minor economic event [music] in Florida, it is a financial pillar. Spring break bookings collapse with projected losses reaching $420 million from cancellations alone. 2,400 hotel rooms closed indefinitely. 67 restaurants shuttered as evacuation zones expand. [music] The coastal economy does not just slow, it stops. The earthquakes nobody saw [music] coming now. Here is where this story moves from alarming into genuinely unprecedented [music] territory.

[00:16:02]December 20th, 2:34 in the morning. A magnitude 2.8 earthquake strikes 15 miles offshore from West Palm Beach.

[00:16:10]Florida does not have earthquakes. This is not opinion. The state sits nowhere near a tectonic plate boundary. [music] The geological conditions that produce seismic activity simply do not exist here. Or at least they were not supposed to. Dr. Kevin Torres, USGS [music] seismologist, stares at his monitoring data with visible disbelief. That month alone, 17 [music] detectable tremors register across the region. 17 in a state that historically records zero.

[00:16:35][music] The scientific debate over the mechanism is frantic, but the leading theory is straightforward and disturbing. [music] Collapsing limestone cavern ceilings drop millions of tons of rock simultaneously, sending [music] stress waves propagating outward through the platform. A secondary theory points to hydraulic pressure. Water rushing into newly formed voids [music] creates shock waves powerful enough to register on seismometers. Dr. Rachel Kim at Caltech reviews the signatures [music] and delivers a line that will appear in geological journals for years. We are observing new phenomena that earthquake science cannot [music] fully explain. A new kind of earthquake produced by a new kind of ground failure. And then the progression begins moving northward, 3 miles per day. Tremors register in Miami. [music] Jacksonville feels unusual vibrations. Georgia activates monitoring systems. South Carolina requests federal geological assessment.

[00:17:25]North Carolina's Outer Banks get [music] a second, much more alarmed look from scientists who had previously dismissed the warning signs as normal erosion.

[00:17:33]Worst-case computer models show the potential for magnitude 5 earthquakes if multiple [music] cave systems fail simultaneously. Magnitude 5 in Florida.

[00:17:42]The state just launched its first earthquake preparedness campaign in modern history. Let [music] that sink in. The spreading threat. Here is the part of the story where Florida's problem becomes everyone's problem.

[00:17:54]Limestone does not stop at state borders. [music] The geological platform beneath Florida extends north through Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and connects [music] to formations running up the entire Atlantic coastal plain. 1,200 mi from the tip of Florida to New Jersey. The same porous, carbonic acid-vulnerable, saltwater-compromised rock formation that currently [music] failing beneath Broward County sits under communities, highways, military installations, and nuclear facilities along the entire Eastern [music] Seaboard. Dr. Michael Torres at Duke University, I am counting six researchers named Torres [music] or Martinez in this script, and I want you to know that is simply what the source material [music] gives me. Dr. Torres proposes what he calls the domino effect theory. Backed by data that alarms coastal researchers when it is presented at an emergency symposium in January of 2025. His argument is straightforward [music] and devastating. Florida's collapse is creating regional destabilization through interconnected geological systems. The pressure changes within the enormous [music] Florida aquifer, one of the largest freshwater aquifer systems in the world, are altering groundwater flow patterns hundreds of miles from the original collapse zone. [music] The aquifer does not respect state lines. It extends from southern Alabama to South Carolina. And as its pressure dynamics shift in response to the collapses, the subsurface [music] conditions in connected regions are changing in ways nobody fully mapped before because nobody needed to until now. The Georgia Department of Natural Resources deploys emergency survey teams [music] to barrier islands within 72 hours of Florida's first collapse. Jekyll Island reports minor subsidence [music] detected in three separate locations.

[00:19:34]Tybee Island experiences unexplained beach erosion accelerating beyond historical rates.

[00:19:40]>> [music] >> These are not dramatic collapses, not yet. They are whispers. But the people listening to those whispers know what a whisper [music] can become. South Carolina's governor requests immediate federal geological assessment. USGS [music] expands its seismic and ground monitoring networks to cover six states simultaneously. The international implications arrive quickly. [music] Lloyd's of London, which has been insuring things since 1686 and which has a fairly well-developed sense of when something [music] is genuinely catastrophic, classifies the entire Atlantic limestone coast [music] as extreme risk. In practical terms, that means essentially uninsurable under traditional coverage models. Think about what that means for property values, for mortgages, [music] for municipal bonds backed by property tax revenue, for the entire financial [music] architecture of coastal communities from Jacksonville to Atlantic City. Geologists looking at the wider picture note that the problem is not unique to the American Southeast.

[00:20:31]The Bahamas sits on identical limestone [music] formations. Caribbean islands share the same geological vulnerabilities. Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula contains the world's largest underwater [music] cave systems, cenotes, stretching for hundreds of miles beneath the jungle floor.

[00:20:47]Mediterranean coastlines are monitoring the Florida situation [music] with the specific attention of people who recognize their own reflection.

[00:20:54]Florida's nightmare, as one international geological survey team puts it with uncomfortable precision, is becoming a global proof of concept.

[00:21:02][music] Economic and political collapse.

[00:21:04]The geological collapse produces an economic collapse that in some ways moves faster. Within the first [music] week, preliminary damage estimates exceed $25 billion and are climbing.

[00:21:14]Property markets freeze completely.

[00:21:16]Coastal real estate sales drop 91%.

[00:21:19][music] Mortgage lenders refuse new loans within 10 miles of documented sinkholes. $67 billion in assessed property [music] value disappears from tax rolls within 2 weeks. Let me repeat that. $67 billion gone from the books. Not destroyed necessarily, though much of it is, but rendered [music] unfinanceable, uninsurable, and unsellable. Property that existed on paper as wealth simply stops being wealth because no institution [music] will assign it value anymore. The insurance industry faces a crisis that predates and accelerates all [music] of this. Citizens Property Insurance, Florida's state-backed insurer of last resort, the insurer that exists specifically to cover people that private companies will not, faces insolvency as claims exceed $18 billion in the first [music] week alone. Private carriers begin canceling 340,000 policies across coastal counties, citing ground collapse exclusions [music] buried in the policy fine print. And this is the detail that enrages the people living through it more than almost anything else. Homeowners who have paid premiums faithfully for [music] decades are discovering that their insurance explicitly excludes the exact disaster destroying their homes.

[00:22:27]It was in the [music] contract the whole time, in a section nobody read because nobody thought Florida's coast would literally collapse.

[00:22:35]follows a pattern that will [music] surprise approximately nobody who has watched American disaster politics for any length [music] of time. The emergency funding request lands in Washington and immediately becomes a political football. Florida's governor submits what becomes the largest single-state FEMA request [music] in history outside of hurricane season, $12 billion in federal disaster relief. [music] House Republicans question whether American taxpayers should subsidize Florida's coastal development decisions.

[00:23:02]Senate Democrats push for immediate approval without conditions. [music] The debate over whether climate change's role in the crisis should be acknowledged in the relief legislation paralyzes action. Meanwhile, in Fort Lauderdale, Maria Martinez is sleeping in an emergency shelter with her daughter Sophia, [music] wondering what has happened to her restaurant. FEMA, for its part, is already stretched to the structural limit. The agency deployed thousands [music] of personnel and enormous resources to California's catastrophic flooding events just weeks earlier.

[00:23:31]Administrator Deanne Criswell warns Congress that FEMA cannot maintain the current operational pace without emergency supplemental funding. The reserves are depleting at rates the agency's [music] budget models never projected because those models assumed disasters of this scale would not happen simultaneously. The tourism numbers tell their own story. Disney World, which is not on the coast [music] and is not in any direct danger, revises attendance projections downward by 22% because the broader perception of Florida as a destination has shifted. Miami [music] Beach hotels report 83% cancellation rates extending through summer. Annual tourism losses are estimated at $43 billion.

[00:24:11]340,000 jobs threatened across Florida's [music] service economy. The cycle reinforces itself. No tourists means no revenue. No revenue means businesses close. Businesses closing means workers unemployed. Workers unemployed means less tax base. Less tax base means less infrastructure maintenance. Less infrastructure maintenance means, [music] and here is where it gets genuinely dark, less ability to monitor, respond to, and mitigate the ongoing geological crisis that started all of this. One week after Lieutenant Commander James Walsh radioed base with depth readings that made [music] no sense, Florida's coastal crisis has not ended. It is not stabilized. It is not shown the signs of deceleration that emergency managers were hoping for [music] when they filed their initial optimistic projections. 47 miles of coastline remain [music] sealed. 23 documented sinkholes scar the seafloor.

[00:25:03]78,000 residents remain displaced from their homes. The seismic tremors continue their northward march at 3 miles per day, reaching into [music] states that have never updated an earthquake preparedness protocol in their history. And beneath all of it, the limestone keeps [music] dissolving.

[00:25:18]This is the part of the story that is hardest to communicate because it runs against the instinct we all have after a disaster. The instinct that is [music] over, that the crisis peaked, that recovery begins now. That instinct is not wrong for hurricanes. It is not wrong for floods. After those events, the damaging force is [music] gone, and what remains is damage to be repaired.

[00:25:38]The limestone platform beneath Florida's coast does not work that way. The chemical reaction between carbonic acid, salt water, and porous rock [music] does not stop because emergency managers declare a crisis. The aquifer pressure changes do not reverse because FEMA deploys. The cavern network does not resolidify because Congress [music] passes a relief bill. Engineers face a recovery challenge with no modern precedent. You cannot rebuild on ground that continues to fail. You cannot pour a foundation over a void that may expand. You cannot certify a structure as safe when the rock beneath it is actively dissolving. Recovery from this disaster requires not just repairing [music] what broke, but understanding a dynamic, ongoing geological process well enough to predict where it will fail next. And that understanding does not yet exist. The fundamental question facing Florida, and given the geological connections we have discussed, [music] facing the entire Atlantic coastal region, is whether communities built in these locations can ever be made permanently safe. Some engineers are already saying quietly, and a few saying publicly, that certain sections of Florida's [music] coast should be considered functionally uninhabitable, not temporarily closed, permanently surrendered. That is a statement with [music] consequences that ripple far beyond geology. It touches on property rights, on generational wealth, on cultural identity, on the basic human attachment to place. What do you owe a community when the ground beneath it is fundamentally [music] unstable? What do you tell a family whose home, whose neighborhood, whose entire framework of a life was built on a foundation that is now dissolving? These are not questions with clean answers. Climate scientists [music] reviewing the conditions driving the accelerated dissolution offer cold comfort. The stressors converging on Florida's coast, sea level rise, salt water intrusion, temperature volatility, increased precipitation [music] intensity, are not temporary conditions produced by a bad season. They are permanent features of the changed climate [music] system. The acceleration is not going to reverse. The trajectory points one direction. The ancient limestone that built this paradise is revealing at [music] the worst possible moment and with the worst possible clarity how fragile it always was. The centuries of stability were not a guarantee. They were a loan, and the bill, as of December 2024, [music] has come due. In June of 2026, as I am recording this, the full scope of what began that December morning off Deerfield Beach is still being calculated. New monitoring data arrives daily. New research teams publish new assessments. [music] New legal battles unfold between homeowners and insurers, between municipalities and the state, between [music] the state and the federal government. The political argument about who is responsible and who pays has not resolved. [music] It may not resolve for decades. What has resolved, what I am what is no longer a matter of scientific debate, is that the ground beneath Florida's most beloved coastline is [music] not what anyone thought it was. The permanence that generations of Floridians and tourists [music] and investors assigned to that sandy, sunny, impossibly beautiful shoreline was always an assumption. An assumption built on limestone. [music] Limestone full of holes. Holes that are getting bigger. The beaches will not all come back. Some of them are at the bottom of the ocean now, [music] 20, 30, 40 feet down in voids that did not exist a year and a half ago. The ancient organic material that washed ashore from 50,000 year-old rock deposits has been cleaned up mostly. The methane readings have been flagged and are being monitored. The seismometers are still running in six states. And in the ground beneath it all, the chemistry continues, quiet, patient, indifferent to [music] headlines and emergency declarations and congressional hearings. The water moves through the rock. The rock surrenders to the water. The caverns grow. The ground that felt so permanent is not [music] permanent at all, and Florida may never feel solid again. If this video reached you, hit subscribe. [music] We cover the disasters that the news cycle moves past too quickly, because geology does not respect a 24-hour news cycle, and neither do we. I am Daniel. Stay safe.

[00:29:33]Watch your step.