An official report on the exploration of Ohio's Marmot Cave was released today. In an article released by the Southern Ohio Association for Study of Outlandishly Boring Stuff (SOASOBS) it was revealed that the worlds smallest cave is now even smaller. Exploration has been ongoing since 1944 when the cave was discovered by a young girl looking for a place to hide a hatchet from her annoying brother. Word of the caves existence soon spread and six years later the first survey expedition was organized. The original map was grossly innacurate due to the fact that the azimuths were guessed, and that there were no backsight guesses. Another attempt at documentation was flawed when the cartographer foolishly added the splay shots to the final survey length, claiming a wild total of 6 1/2 feet of horizontal extent. That length was enough to put the cave among the smallest yet discovered, but it wasn't until the iniquities of the cartographer were realized that cavers began to realize just how small of a cave they were dealing with. Many resurveys were undertaken and performed and the cave gradually came to be recognized as the worlds smallest. The official length stood at exactly 4 feet from 1979 to 2001 as controversy raged over the appropriateness of Marmot's designation as a cave at all. SOASOBS President Randy Loizo announced in 1999 that Marmot had been officially confirmed as a cave under the guidelines set forth by the Ohio Society of Holes, Hollows, and Indentations - meeting all of the following criteria:
A Cave must be naturally occuring, recessed from the surface of the surrounding material, enterable by at least the human head, and of an origin other than the uprooting of a tree. In March of 2001, SOASOBS members reacted to the exciting news that a partial collapse had made Marmot even shorter by organizing yet another resurvey effort. The "collapse" was found to be in the form of a single stone at a point in the cave where the passage narrows dramatically. Some theorized that the stone was dragged in by a deranged groundhog, thrown in by a passing child, or birthed from the ground as the result of some mysterious volcanic incongruity. Despite the confusion surrounding the stones origin, there is no question that it is now blocking a passage that one used to be able to insert an arm into, in the case of smaller cavers, all the way to the shoulder. Some of the expedition felt that the stone could be moved and that there was no need for a resurvey. Theo Giesel though, vehemently argued that human manipulation of the cave would be improper, stating that anyone could dig a hole in the hillside, and that moving the rock would jeapordize Marmot's claim to caveness. After much consideration, camp was set up and the latest resurvey was undertaken. The resulting survey and map (shown below) reveal that Marmot Cave is now less than 2 feet long. While it is unclear exactly when the under-2-foot mark was broken, the team feels confident that their latest survey is accurate to within a few sixteenths of an inch. Jonath Carter, who has been involved in the Marmot project for the past 3 decades feels that the cave may have more secrets in store. "As time goes by, redundancy issues are resolved, and survey methods evolve, I think we could well find that the cave is even shorter than we now believe. Also, while rumors of a possible disconnection between the Far Corner and Drip Line are far from being confirmed, I don't think that such a discovery is beyond the range of possibility."
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