How is a cave formed?

[George Dasher]

I was probably drunk but just hadn't fallen down yet.

[Amemeba]

I think we're talking saturation of calcium carbonate, not of carbon dioxide. Water containing different amounts of C02 can contain different amounts of calcium carbonate. The more CO2, the more rock dissolves before the water becomes saturated with calcium carbonate.

Right Dwight, but there's more occult chemistry in the occassion of CO2 charged waters mixing. ( See Teresa's mathamatical calculations in her story about the cheap drunken sluts leaving the dance with random whoremongers.)

Heck, you could say conduit karst has the poorest hydraulic circulation of all. After all, that water moves fast and usually is just plain gone somewhere else.

Not so, George, if you consider that most of the cave enlargement going on during this Interglacial is moving under a hydrolic head and seeps quite slowly beneath surface streams or into the local water table.

I will explain by using HYdrology_Joe's cave structue chart if I can get it to enlarge.

[Dwight Livingston]

Right Dwight, but there's more occult chemistry in the occassion of CO2 charged waters mixing. ( See Teresa's mathamatical calculations in her story about the cheap drunken sluts leaving the dance with random whoremongers.)

The analogy I'd use is two groups of cavers, say two teams of four cavers, carrying dig spoils from a dig. Say it's a long carry and say they always try to carry as much as they can. Give them a few bags and they'll carry a lot more than in their hands.

Give them one bag and they'll give it to the strongest caver. He'll carry a mess of dirt. Give them another bag and they'll give it to the second strongest. The team will carry more dirt but not twice as much. Give them more bags and they'll all carry even more, but not so much per bag, since the weight is getting them down. Each additional bag adds less and less to the total amount they can carry. Eventually throwing more bags at them is not going to make much difference.

So let's say the first team of four cavers has one bag and the second team of four cavers has twelve bags. Say they meet while traveling from the dig, each team carrying all they can. They mix and share all the bags. Now the first team can carry a lot more and the second team can carry a little less, so together they can carry more dirt. Always wanting to carry all they can, they dig a little dirt where they meet and carry it with them.

Hopefully it is easy to see that the cavers are like the water, the bags are like the CO2, and the dirt is like the limestone.

[Teresa]

Dwight:


I think I would have put the correlation key at the beginning, but your explanation is pretty good, too!