They’re dark, they’re damp, they’re cold, and most of the time, they’re deadly.
Caves are some of the least-explored phenomena of the modern world, even in today’s age of exploration. It’s been said that caves are the last frontier (at least on our own planet); even the bottom of the ocean has been more thoroughly explored than caves.
While NASA is preparing its next adventure to Mars, there are hundreds of thousands of miles of underground caverns, holding treasures you’d have to see to believe.
CAVE FORMATION: BY THE SWEAT OF CLOUDS AND BLOOD OF THE EARTH
The first step to forming a cave (in this case, a solution cave) is to smush hundreds of thousands of years of sea creatures’ shells under the ocean floor. Cue plate tectonics, and subduct that ocean plate underneath a continent. Fast forward time another few thousand years, and you get beds of highly soluble limestone. Let there be rain, and the rain soaks into the Earth, through the insoluble layers of metamorphic and igneous rocks, and dissolves the limestone, forming giant tunnels and caverns.
Of course, for a solution cave to properly form, the water needs to be constantly in motion. If the rainwater simply pooled in a hole and evaporated, all the limestone would be left behind. It’s taken thousands (sometimes millions) of years for vast underground waterways to carve out the caves we know today.
Every cave has an entrance and every cave has an exit. Sometimes the entrances are too small to stick a potato into, and sometimes they are big enough through which to successfully fly a 747, like Mexico’s Cheve cave.
CAVE LIFE: SURVIVES WITHOUT THAT PRECIOUS BALL OF GAS YOU WIMPS CALL THE SUN
You may be thinking, how can things live in caves where there is no sunlight/photosynthesis/life???? And that’s a totally legitimate thought – but let me tell you, life has a sneaky way of living where it shouldn’t be able to.
Firstly, the majority of cave life is at the entrance of the cave, all the way back to just where the sunlight stops penetrating. These are your bats, birds, giant cockroach-covered hills of guano, and the blind snakes that use heat-sensing abilities to catch the bats. The deeper you delve into a cave, the weirder life gets.
Take the snotite. Yes, I said SNOTite. This little mass of bacteria earns its name well – it eats sulfur, hangs from the ceiling like a giant loogey, and secretes sulfuric acid. These little buggers are part of the reason why caves can be toxic to human exploration.
Color and eyesight are the first things to go when troglobites (animals that spend their entire lives in caves) adapt to life in a cave. Then more subtle things start to happen, like adjustments to metabolism and other life processes.
My personal favorite is the pigmentless, eyeless cave salamander. Evolution doesn’t usually operate backwards. The fact that some cave animals, like salamanders and fish, don’t have eyes, means that thousands of generations have been isolated in caves for an unimaginable length of time. The salamander’s metabolism has slowed down so that it doesn’t require a lot of sustenance…but it can strike quicker than Flash when a morsel of food washes by. They also don’t have lungs, but absorb oxygen through their skin.
CAVE EXPLORERS: HAVE A DEATH WISH
The deepest cave in world (that we know of) is Georgia’s Krubera cave (and by Georgia, I mean the country). It was discovered by a team of Ukranian cavers in 2004, tapping in at a little over 5,000 feet (since then more than 2,000 more feet have been discovered). For a while it was a close race between Krubera and Mexico’s supercave, Cheve, doggedly explored by the famous caver, Bill Stone. (If you haven’t read it, you should, now: The Blind Descent, a book by James A. Tabor recounting the search for the deepest cave on Earth.)
Even though the payoff is to be known as the discover-er of the deepest cave on the planet, the cost can be huge. The horrors of caving (only amateurs spelunk) come in many forms, as recounted by Tabor, in my favorite paragraph of that book:
“…drowning, fatal falls, premature burial, asphyxiation, hypothermia, hurricane-force winds, electrocution, earthquake-induced collapses, poison gases…walls dripping with sulfuric acid…hydrochloric acid…rabid bats, snakes…scorpions, radon, and microbes that cause hideous diseases…Kitum Cave in Uganda is believed to be the birthplace of…the Ebola virus.” (Tabor, 2010, 16)
Those are just a fraction of the ways you can die in a cave. There is also something called “The Rapture,” which Tabor describes as “a panic attack on meth,” which can strike at any moment.
Don’t even get me started on cave-diving. To discover the true depth of Krubera cave, the cavers had to squeeze through a ten-foot-long underwater tunnel that was only wide enough for a person…a person lacking any kind of bulky equipment, like, say, air tanks. Cave divers with nitrogen poisoning have been known to just take their masks off and try to hand them off to fish.
Most of the time, though, cave exploration pays off. Without those incredibly brave people, we wouldn’t have the stunningly beautiful Lechugilla cave of New Mexico, and its vast galleries of giant crystals.
And without the exploration of caves, I wouldn’t have been able to squeal in ecstatic giddiness during the entirety of the “Caves” episode of Planet Earth.
So I thank you, cavers, for your brilliant contributions to science.
Caves: a brief lesson in awesome
Daily Emerald
November 15, 2010
0
More to Discover