Mexico's Maya Train is destroying ancient caves. Learn about the beautiful 'cenotes' under threat

abcnews.go.com:

Mexico’s outgoing leader has rapidly built a train system looping around the country’s southern Yucatan Peninsula

AKTUN TUYUL CAVE SYSTEM, Mexico — Mexico’s outgoing leader has rapidly built a train system looping around the country’s southern Yucatan Peninsula.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador promised the more than $30 billion Maya Train project would connect tourist hubs like Cancún and Playa del Carmen to dense jungle and remote archaeological sites, drawing money into long-neglected rural swathes of the country.

But the crown jewel of the populist’s presidency also runs over one of Mexico’s natural wonders: A fragile system of an estimated 10,000 subterranean caverns, rivers, lakes, and freshwater sinkholes.

As his term comes to an end, Associated Press journalists traveled along a section of that cave network, documenting its destruction.

The cave system contains one of the biggest aquifers in Mexico and acts as the region’s main water source, crucial at a time when the nation faces a deepening water crisis.

The region was once a reef nestled beneath the Caribbean Sea, but changing sea levels pushed Mexico’s southern peninsula out of the ocean as a mass of limestone. Water sculpted the porous stone into caves over the course of millions of years.

It produced the open-face freshwater caverns known as “cenotes” and underground rivers that are in equal parts awe-inspiring and delicate, explained Emiliano Monroy-Ríos, a geologist at Northwestern University studying the region.

“These ecosystems are very, very fragile,” Monroy-Ríos said. “They are building upon a land that is like gruyere cheese, full of caves and cavities of different sizes and at different depths.”

The train has sparked criticism by