Caving scientists exploring the darkest places on Earth | Hacker News Reader

Caving scientists exploring the darkest places on Earth

bbc.com

68 pointsThevet26 comments

I used to cave dive years and years ago and explore dry caves when we lived in the Missouri area. There are a ton of limestone caves there. Many aren't mapped or really marked at all, especially when you get in the bluffs along the Mississippi.

I stopped when I got stuck in a tight passage and almost drowned in a flash flood. Caves seem like these super cool places and they're climate controlled so they seemed kind of, I don't know, soft?

Then I figured out they're not and they're really really really fucking dangerous. Oh, the stupid stuff 20 year olds get up to.

The death of John Jones in Nutty Putty cave is the stuff of nightmares.

He was trapped upside down for 27 hours before dying.

https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/geolog...

Oh wow - I saw this story a few weeks ago (absolutely horrifying) and ended up binging on caving incident stories. My takeaway was that regardless of how experienced the spelunkers are, something can go wrong.

In the midst of my binge, I also found this awesome(ly horrifying) Youtube Channel of cave explorers. They have explored some amazing caves, but here's a video of them in some really tight spaces to illustrate the risk these explorers take (warning, may induced some anxiety): https://youtu.be/Us-XA2BRLgg?si=Lb62ZE1IHG4MD6K3&t=677

I'm scared of heights but I'm attracted to rock climbing, so I climb anyway and just deal with it. Caves also have a certain attraction, but those stories terrify me far more than the prospect of a serious fall. The idea of dying trapped in a tight space underground makes dying on a rock climb sound downright comforting.

Admittedly the main lesson I take away from that one is "if you can only make progress by going vertically down with no space to move your arms...maybe give that cave a miss".

It's kinda related to something I always try to drill into people about going outdoors in my country (NZ) "never descend something you can't ascend" and "never climb up something you can't climb down".

I know it sounds stupidly repetitive but both are true in related manners.

1) Downclimbing is far harder than climbing up.

2) If you made a mistake, you need to be able to turn back.

When it comes to descending, it's primarily when you have options other than downclimbing, like jumping into a small waterfall's plunge pool.

Are you jumping into the pool because it's fun, or easy? Or are you jumping down because you can't climb down.

If you can't climb down, then how do you know you can climb back up if you made a mistake?

Jumping into plunge pools in a canyon is a good way to get bluffed, that is, trapped by cliffs and waterfalls, you hit a waterfall too high to jump down, and you can't climb out of the gorge you're in.

But goes the same when ascending, it is easy to climb up something, harder to climb down it, what's your exit strategy if you made a mistake.

So yeah, anything that involves compressing my ribs and immobilising an arm feels like it's far too committed, no ctrl-Z on this.

I find it hard to say whether that is more terrifying or the Sterkfontein accident: cave diver gets lost, finds an exist to a non-submerged part of the cave and waits for rescue, alone and in complete darkness. Until he starves to death after three weeks. Is found a few days too late.

Injun Joe’s death in Tom Sawyer comes to mind. He actually found the exit but it had been sealed shut to prevent more kids from getting lost inside the cave. Starved to death 3cm from freedom. (Apologies for the spoiler if anyone reading this had not read Tom Sawyer!)

There’s another massive entrapment in 1925 Floyd Collins. It captured the nation radio side for the duration. Not as well known because of media gaps over time. Floyd also didn’t make it out but the engineering / efforts were large similar to John Jones.

https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/tragedy-at-sand-cave.htm

Insanely dangerous, and even well marked, frequently explored caves can abruptly turn deadly even for experienced cavers. Still more terrifying is cave diving, in which explorers descend by up to hundreds of meters through winding, claustrophobic, narrow caves entirely filled with water.

At least with "dry" cave exploration, if you get stuck, you might survive up to several days with a hope of rescue, assuming you can stay hydrated and not freeze to death. With submerged cave exploration, the minute you run into serious trouble, the clock starts ticking with life lasting only as long as your air tanks. The stuff of nightmares.

This YouTube channel covers many of these accidents and incidents really well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2xs90tbEeY

Even with dry caves, you have issues with flooding like what happened in Thailand. One minute you're a kid on a outing with a soccer team and the next thing you know a little monsoon on the outside traps you and you're stuck in a pocket area for a week before some dentist cave divers can anesthetize you and drag you back. I watched a documentary on it...crazy stuff.

It was such an amazing rescue. I don't think the general public at the time really understood how incredibly stuck they were. I mean at one point the best solution was really looking like waiting half a year until the monsoon season finishes. There was just no brute-force solution, they couldn't dig them out, they couldn't pump out the water, they couldn't find another way in.

the rescue included brute force as well as strategy. they had to run all their pumps just to keep the water levels near the entrance from rising too high for the rescue operation. they were basically fighting against the ever rising water levels just to keep them steady.

Agreed, hence my quotation marks around the word dry above. Some caves genuinely stay dry because of their structure or location, and others can suddenly, lethally flood. but even the truly dry ones can kill in no time just like that through a litany of terrible reasons, experts and amateurs both being victims.

It would however be a bad idea for someone to assume a truly dry cave is thus safe enough to let their guard down because they know how much more dangerous flood-prone or submerged caves are.

I knew it was Scary Interesting before clicking. :)

We used to joke that our student caving club was really very safe, having only had seven fatalities over the 50 years it had been operating.

In reality we had a lot of expertise and took safety very seriously. The club had always done a lot of exploration of new caves and other intrinsically tricky activities, and six of the seven deaths were in the same accident (the Mossdale Caverns tragedy of 1967). Our parties of freshers were in very limited danger being trained in well-known and well-explored caves. But still.

You couldn't pay me enough to squeeze myself in narrow tunnels underground. But I'm glad there are brave explorers who can do it.

The most insane kind of caving I've ever seen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSOLDGaooQI (cave diving 245 meters deep)

> Caving is the last realm where true, pure exploration is possible

What about the floor of the ocean and space?

There's not much to find for 99.99% of both of those. Like, exploring a distant planet versus exploring actual vacuum "space", is similar to exploring an undersea thermal vent versus exploring millions of square miles of featureless silt around it.

Do you really think in caves is more to be found, than on the seabed?

Most caves you will find, will look exactly like the cave before. Different types of rock. If you are lucky, crystals. In the deep sea, you have chances of finding entirely new species. (Only some caves have life at all)

Caves can have intricate ecosystems. There was an article on here some time ago how a single bag of chips completely altered the balance of a cave's fauna and flora.

Both require vast amounts of money. Exploring caves is a lot more affordable (but still not cheap).

melting glaciers are revealing territory previously inaccessible let alone unexplored

Speleologists really need to start 3D-scanning, at least crudely, all the caves.

Title should be: Scientists cave to the darkness.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com