The water shouldn’t look like this.

That color — that impossible, electric turquoise — looks like a postcard that got over-edited. Like someone pushed a saturation slider too far. It wasn’t edited. That’s just what the Caicos Banks look like.

Here’s why.

The Banks are an underwater limestone plateau roughly 4,000 square miles in size. Average depth: ten to fifteen feet. In places, barely enough to cover your knees. That shallowness is everything.

Sunlight reflects off a white sandy bottom made almost entirely of broken-down coral and seashells. There are no rivers here, no mountains, no runoff to cloud it. The islands are flat limestone. What little rain falls simply dissolves back into the rock.

The Banks are built on crust that tore away from Northwest Africa 200 million years ago — which, geologically speaking, was fairly recent. During the last ice age, this was all dry land — a single landmass larger than Puerto Rico. The sea has reclaimed most of it since. The Banks give the islands their beaches, their fishing, their reefs. They also sit directly in the Caribbean hurricane corridor.

There is nowhere to hide in fifteen feet of water. Which is how a Soviet ship ended up out here.

But that’s another story.

And that is the story behind the place.