Posted on 04/22/2005 2:04:00 PM PDT by LibWhacker
Krubera is the deepest known cave in the world
A Ukrainian team has set a new depth record for caving.
The nine-strong group travelled 2,080m (6,822ft) underground, passing the elusive 2,000m mark at Krubera, the world's deepest known cave.
The team was part of a project that has made breaking through 2,000m its goal for the past four years.
It built on records set by a previous expedition, which blasted through blocked passages in the cave, within Georgia's breakaway region of Abkhazia.
"Even now, we don't know whether we've reached the limit - or if it will go on. We're pretty sure we'll eventually go even lower," said Alexander Klimchouk, the veteran caver who organised the mission.
The Ukrainian Speleological Association's Call of the Abyss project is funded by the US National Geographic Society.
During an expedition from August to September 2004, a team of 56 cavers (45 men and 11 women) representing seven countries explored Kubera, deep below the Arabika mountain massif of the western Caucasus.
Obstacle course
Carrying about five tonnes of equipment, they had to negotiate vertical drops and freezing torrents of water. They were also forced to blast rubble from passages that were critically narrowed or blocked by "boulder chokes".
They set camps at depths of 700m, 1,215m, 1,410m and 1,640m, where they cooked meals, slept up to six people to a tent and worked for up to 20 hours at a stretch.
The cavers kept in touch with the surface base camp by rigging nearly 3km (two miles) of rope strung with a telephone wire.
But the August-September expedition encountered many obstacles. By the third week, a sump (cold pond in the cave) blocked the team's downward progress.
When team member Sergio Garcia-Dils de la Vega investigated if there was a way through, he was confronted by a cascade of near-freezing water and was forced to retreat after discovering his waterproof dry suit had holes in it.
Deeper still
Finally, colleagues Denis Kurta and Dmitry Fedotov squeezed through a narrow, 100m-long passage, which successfully bypassed the sump and pointed steeply down.
In October, a team of nine cavers was sent back to Krubera to pick up where the previous group left off.
They examined all unexplored leads in the cave's lowest section until they broke through to a new series of passages and vertical pits. On 19 October 2004, team leader Yuri Kasjan dropped down a pit and discovered from his altimeter that he had passed 2,000m.
More pits and passages brought the explorers to a sandy chamber at 2,080m, the deepest to date any caver has ventured below ground (gold miners in South Africa regularly go beyond 3,400m).
The team christened the chamber Game Over. But the group now wants to return to the cave to see whether it leads even deeper.
Details and photographs of the expeditions appear in this month's National Geographic magazine.
Intense. The only thing I know that's more awesome is underwater cave exploration. Wear your buddy on your back.
Spelunk you very much
Yeah, but they used dynamite to clear their way through. That makes this little more than glorified mining.
Spelunking = stupid in the dark.
Well, unless you're an itsy-bitsy spelunker, what else would you suggest?
Cave dwelling is not really for someone with claustrophobia.
When asked about the size of the cave, a Ukranian replied "I haven't seen a crater this big since the GOP cratered to the demorats on the Bolton nomination!"
guess they have not heard of our GOP.
My complaint is simply that they're claiming a record by making their own cave -- but miners already do that, and have thereby surpassed this record by 1500 meters.
It's the spelunking equivalent of steroids....
The cave existed, but choke points get clogged with rubble. The rubble needs to be blasted out from the pre-existing cave.
Similarly, use of Drano does not constitute drain pipe manufacturing.
Just pulling your chain r9....sorry, ;). IIRC, spelunkers of old were not allowed to blow their way through millions of years of history just to set records, apparently times have changed.
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I'll bet if this were happening in the US, the Sierra Club would be throwing out restraining orders like crazy, making cops go down into the cave and bring the offenders out, lol.
When I was a little Airman, I used to do some spelunking. Unless you're caving on private property, the restrictions now are Orwellian.
I did caving once, the kind where at certain points you squeeze through tight areas going down.. I was somewhat ok with it at the time, but shortly after finishing I became progressively more freaked out about what I had been doing, and the possibilities of what could have happened. I never thought about trying it again.
The most dangerous part of this trip though, was probably being in Abkazia at all. :)
But he went into it right after the narrator talked about another guy who had died doing something similar; this fellow had gone in, got to a point where he couldn't go forward any further and couldn't back up either. The hole had narrowed and squeezed his chest. He couldn't breathe and died.
Fortunately, the guy on Discovery didn't die. But cavers are nuts!
They still haven't gotten as low as the Clintons. They have a long, long way to go.
Wow, I could never do it. I was freaking out just watching it, lol.
I did it with a guide who knew the cave well, and was skilled. Even with that I still think it was stupid.
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