Long before theme parks started sprouting from Orlando’s swamps, Florida’s freshwater springs were among the area’s major attractions.
Native Americans used the resources for thousands of years before the Spanish conquistadors arrived in the 1500s. The conquistadors’ accounts of clear water gushing from hollow holes in forest floors fueled myths about the Fountain of Youth’s existence.
Several hundred years later, when sulfur springs were thought to have therapeutic properties, White Sulfur Springs, on the banks of the Suwannee River, became one of Florida’s first commercial tourist attractions. By the early 1900s, the debut of glass-bottom boats gave tourists a bird’s-eye view of Florida’s springs, and the pristine underwater landscapes attracted early filmmakers. Dozens of underwater movies and television shows have been shot in Silver Springs alone, a group of springs in Marion County, including “Sea Hunt” and “The Creature From the Black Lagoon.”
Florida has the densest collection of freshwater springs in the world. Every day, the state’s more than 1,000 freshwater sources collectively discharge billions of gallons of groundwater to the surface. Springs provide critical habitat for aquatic animals, including the iconic Florida manatee, and anchor the recreation industry to Florida’s backwaters. Visitors from all over the world flock to Florida’s springs to fish, kayak, tub, swim, and dive through the miles of underwater caverns that connect springs to the aquifer and channel water to the surface. Springs tourism is injecting money into rural economies across the state.
And yet, despite their fundamental role in the state’s tourism industry, Florida’s resources are at the center of a slow-motion environmental tragedy.
In recent decades, a combination of development, population growth, climate change, aquifer overpumping, and pollution from agriculture and sewage has wreaked havoc on Florida’s resources. Many wells show significantly reduced water flow. Others have stopped flowing altogether.
Kissengen Spring was one of the first recorded victims. More than 20 million gallons of water a day once flowed from Kissengen Spring into the Peace River. Spring had diving platforms and bathhouses and was used as a resort by members of the military during World War II.
Between the 1930s and the 1950s, the flow of water from the well gradually decreased to a trickle. In the early 1960s, the well stopped flowing completely. A United States Geological Survey report revealed that pumping groundwater between the 1950s and 1975 lowered the groundwater level by as much as 60 feet. When the height of the water in the aquifer feeding the well dropped below the height of the well opening, the water stopped flowing.
Steadily declining water levels also choked the water supply to White Sulfur Springs, one of Florida’s first tourist attractions, which first stopped flowing in 1977.
At the same time, aquifers were depleted, pollution from septic tanks, sewage, agricultural fertilizers and limited animal feed have flooded the wells with excess nutrients, fueling algal blooms in wells across the state. The white, sandy bottoms and undulating seagrass bushes in 1940s and 1950s movies have been replaced by thick mats of green, hairy algae, covering all underwater surfaces. Without seagrass, the foundation of healthy wells, the ecosystems around wells collapse.
At Silver Springs, so much algae has accumulated that volunteer divers remove it by hand. Each month, members of the Silver Springs Professional Dive Team descend to scrub algae from the bottom of the glass-bottom boats, allowing visitors to see the old underwater movie sets, which the divers also have to clean.
The state of Florida officially acknowledged that most Florida resources were in trouble more than two decades ago, when Jeb Bush, then governor, signed legislation in 2001 establishing the Florida Springs Initiative. The program delivered the first of several consecutive funding streams for research, monitoring, education and assistance to landowners to reduce the flow of sewage and fertilizer to wells and address declining spring flows.
Data collected as a result of the initiative has enabled scientists to track the relentless decline of Florida’s resources in excruciating detail. Importantly, this data shows that efforts to protect resources have so far been ineffective as nutrient pollution has continued to increase.
While many wells are in decline, ongoing restoration work in the source-fed Crystal River, on Florida’s Gulf Coast, shows some of the damage can be reversed. Crystal River is the second largest source group in the state of Florida. Decades ago, Crystal River’s gin-clear sight made it a famous fishing and diving destination. However, in the 1960s and 1970s, development, dredging of canals for boat-based communities, and pollution triggered a cascade of events that caused the river’s seagrass beds to collapse and be replaced by blankets of algae in the following decades. Crystal River’s famous sight deteriorated until it rarely exceeded 10 feet.
Over the past six years, community organization Save Crystal River and water recovery company Sea & Shoreline have used a combination of state and federal funding to remove more than a quarter of a billion pounds of algae and nutrient-rich fertilizer from Crystal River’s bottom. and plants more than 350,000 seagrass plants.
As the replanted seagrass beds have expanded, they have improved visibility and now even support a year-round population of Florida’s most famous vegetarians: manatees.
The successful seagrass replanting project has not solved all of Crystal River’s problems. Sea level rise and groundwater pumping continue to reduce water flow to Crystal River’s wells, and the water that comes out is getting saltier. While there is clearly still work to be done, steady improvements in water clarity and a growing manatee population support a thriving ecotourism industry and show what can be achieved when state governments and local communities work together and draw on scientific data to improve their save resources.
Jason Guley is an associate professor of geology at the University of South Florida, diving instructor, and environmental, science, and expedition photographer based in Tampa, Florida. You can follow his work on Instagram†
