by CRAIG PITTMAN | MAY 27, 2016 The Ripple Effect: Why We Love the Florida Springs Why we love and need to protect the fantastical, all-natural springs, the watery wonders of our state On my first visit to Ichetucknee Springs State Park, just outside Gainesville, I stood at the edge of the spring and gazed down, down, down into the depths of the water. The water was as clear as glass—clearer, really. It was so crystalline, I could see a small freshwater turtle scooting across the sandy bottom of the spring, and it was as if it were swimming through air. I could see every detail of its shell. I stared, amazed, until I felt as if I were about to fall headlong into the water. At that point, before I joined the turtle, I backed away. Big springs like Ichetucknee that gush out a lot of water are called “first magnitude” springs. Florida has more of them than any other place in the world—more than Yellowstone, more even than New Zealand’s famed Rotorua. Each one is a window into where our drinking water comes from. Deep beneath the ground we stand on, below the strip malls and condos and cul-de-sacs, under the office parks and rumbling concrete highways and lush green golf courses, there’s a reservoir of water that makes life in Florida possible. The underground Floridan aquifer, which stretches beneath central and north Florida, roars through Swiss-cheese caverns of crumbling limestone, bubbling up to the surface in the springs, producing what environmental activist Marjory Stoneman Douglas once called “bowls of liquid light.”
Source: The Ripple Effect: Why We Love the Florida Springs | Flamingo Magazine