It looks inviting, but you wouldn't want to swim in there.
That is dark and lonely water.
It looks toxically blue, and it is. It's alkaline, it's got a pH above 11, it would be like swimming
in dilute bleach. Not enough to cause immediate injury, but enough to irritate your skin and
your eyes over time. Enough to cause some problems a day or so later.
It would feel like if you'd washed with soap and then didn't rinse it off, just let it dry.
That alkaline comes from limestone. This is an old limestone quarry, leaching calcite
crystals into the water. It can't be drained, where would you pump it to? It'd just harm
the local water supply then fill up with rainwater and become toxic again.
Only a fool would ignore this,
but there's one born every minute.
But for a while, this wasn't the Blue Lagoon, this was the Black Lagoon. And the black wasn't
dangerous: it was black dye, put in by the local council. It was harmless. But that blue:
that's inviting. The black, with the dye in, it was just as toxic, it was just as unhealthy,
it was just as likely to make you ill. It was just as likely to give you a nasty fungal
infection a few days later because you'd accidentally bleached part of your body, but: blue water.
That's tropical seas, sunshine and holidays. Black water?
Oh, we don't want to swim in that.
Dying this water black was a genius idea. It did more than a hundred warning signs ever
could. And it meant that a lot of people didn't end up getting ill from swimming.
But now it's 2015: the Blue Lagoon is blue again and I guarantee you, this summer someone
is going to bleach themselves.
[Translating this video? Add your name here if you'd like credit!]