NEW YORK: A new exploration of a legendary blue hole in the South China Sea has found that the underwater feature is the deepest known on Earth, CBS news said in a report on Thursday.

Citing Xinhua News CBS news said the Dragon Hole, or Longdong, is 987 feet (300 metres) deep, far deeper than the previous record holder, Deans Blue Hole in the Bahamas . (That blue hole measures about 663 feet, or 202 metres deep.)

According to Xinhua, local legend holds that Dragon Hole is mentioned in the Ming dynasty novel “Journey to the West,” in which a supernatural monkey character gets a magical cudgel from an undersea kingdom ruled by a dragon.

The findings have yet to be confirmed or reviewed by scientists in the field, but if they hold up, the measurements peg Dragon Hole as far deeper than Dean’s Blue Hole, said Pete van Hengstum, a marine geologist at Texas A&M University at Galveston, who conducts research on blue holes and sinkholes throughout the Caribbean region.

Blue holes are water filled sink holes that form in carbonate rock such as limestone. Over long periods of time, the carbonate rock dissolves in the subsurface to form caves or cavities, van Hengstum told Live Science.

Published in Dawn, July 29th, 2016