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Expedition Siberia 2005 - Peter Holubek


A group of five Slovaks, including four cavers from Slovenská Speleologická SpoloÄ

Wow! Makes Anvil Cave near Decatur, Alabama look like child's play and it has 12 miles of maze passage under roughly 10 acres of surface area.

Mike,

That map made me think of Anvil Cave, too.

We used to have wallet sized versions of the Anvil Cave map. They were great conversation pieces. Bill Varnedo may have been one of the original surveyors and he ran the annual Rally for many years. What fun those were.

The cave is contained within the 8m thick band of limestone? Amazing!

Cheryl

Two hundred feet down stream on Flint Creek from Anvil Cave is Moore's #1 cave (I think that Anvil Cave was originally Moore's #2).

Varnedoe and company back in '73 mapped this smaller maze cave at about three and a quarter miles with multiple leads still going. (He said that they just got tired of crawling and mapping).

But here is the kicker!

If a connecting passageway can be found around an intervening gully, and if the right angle maze type of passage continues beneath the flat laying Hartselle Sandstone in between, then a cave of over one hundred miles is in Morgan County.

For many years I've tried to get young enthusiastic cavers to push these crawls to find the connection, but today's young cavers seem to be wimps.

I feel like such an American.. I had to convert the meters to miles before it made any sense (it's about 38 miles).

Which isn't too long, at the moment. (on the other hand, it's not that short, either.) There are probably three cave systems in the US that could ultimately vie for the 'Longest in the World' title. Mammoth (obviously), Jewel - Wind (haha.. i've connected them!) and Carlsbad-Lech.

all are over 100 miles long (161,000 meters) and none have come closeto tapping out their limestone yet.

I'd be intrested to see what the long / deep lists look like in a hundred years. Speculation on it migth be a good thread starter, too.

John

You have a point

Currently explored approx: 38 miles
Its potencial development estimation: 27,000 miles (!!!)

27,000 miles!?

That's a lota cave! Anyone care to add up the long cave list and see how many miles of cave, in the whole world, have been surveyed? I bet it's not even close to 27,000 miles.

Cheryl,

Yep, 8m thick is unusual, but there is an area with a gypsum cave just east of Ascaffenburg in Germany with a similar area. A thin bed of limestone/gypsum with a large maze cave in it. I forget the name.

After caving in Germany we usually stopped at the "first Gasthaus on the right" for lunch. The one this time had a dining room alongside the stable with no window in between. It was a small farming town after all. Still, the beer was good.

The current sum of 1+ miles on Bob's US cave list is 4238.16. I have a habit of following the list and seeing how it changes from month to month. So I thow it in Excel and compare each state to the previous month to see how productive differenct areas are. I've thought of doing the same for the World list but haven't.

Spike

Scott McCrea wrote:27,000 miles!?

That's a lota cave! Anyone care to add up the long cave list and see how many miles of cave, in the whole world, have been surveyed? I bet it's not even close to 27,000 miles.

I dunno, Scott, if the United States alone has, as Spike has computed, over 4,238.15 miles of cave passage just counting the caves that are over one mile long, then it seems likely that there is enough known underground cave passage to encircle the Earth, maybe twice.

But obviously the Ruskies are wrong. It takes more than than having a hundred mile square of 30 feet of flat laying limestone to have a 27,000 mile maze cave. Like in all solutional maze caves it takes continuous right angle jointing throughout the expanse to induct the process.

Secondly, a system of contiguous ground water flow moving under a hydraulic head must be set in motion. And since recharge requires discharge, there in lies the problem of unequal down cutting at the perimeter of the rock aquifer perched above.

My dollar against your ruble that, at the very most, the Russkies have only a thousand mile long cave.

I agree that a look at the long caves list in 100 years will be interesting to say the least. There is a lot of speculation out there. 27,000 miles in Russia, 1000 miles for Mammoth, etc.

Here at Jewel, the figure of 5000 miles gets thrown around a lot. That comes from an estimated volume of 5 billion cubic feet. (based on barometric airflow) Considering the explored volume of Jewel is around 150 million cubic feet, we have discovered less than 5% of the volume! When you project the average passage cross-section of 13 X 13 feet, that's where the 5000 miles comes from. Now, we have new airflow data that suggests that the volume may be closer to 14 billion cubic feet! That means we could be talking about 15,000 miles of cave and we are well out of the realm of anything easily imaginable.

As cavers, we need to distinguish between speculative science and the hard reality of survey length in the time we live in. Right now Jewel has 135.57 miles surveyed, the second longest cave in the world. That is all we can claim for sure. In my lifetime, I may see Jewel hit 200 miles, but that is about the most I could hope for, and I am not yet an old man. I will not be around when the golden spike is driven that connects Wind and Jewel, nor will I see Jewel pass Mammoth in my lifetime.

There may be 27,000 miles in Siberia, but don't look for it in the next NSS News.

These are my personal views and opinions, not necessarily those of the National Park Service.

Hey Roppelcaver. Where are ya? Surely you have some thoughts on long caves? Though I could imagine you might not want to voice those thoughts publicly????

Is there a list that factors in length and depth to come up with a new type of overall measurement? In other words, what is the longest-deepest cave/deepest-longest?

It seems like something that could be illustrated with a graph.

Has this been done?