Where is the deepest cave in the world?

Let's witness the "Mount Everest" in the cave.

Ver？ The cave of vkina(Veryovkina) has set a depth record of 2212m, which is the deepest cave ever measured in the world. It is located in the Arabica Mountains in Abkhazia, and Abkhazia is located in Georgia. There are four deepest caves in this area, not one.

Veryovkina was first discovered by Soviet cave scientists in 1968. They only explored the depth of115m, and did not know the true scale of this huge cave system. 1983, an expedition led by Oleg Parfenov climbed down a well and led the researchers to a new branch of the cave, where they recorded a depth of 440 meters. It was not until the 265438+early 20th century that the Perovuo Cave Organization and the Perovuo Cave Club, headquartered in Moscow, organized new exploration activities in Veryovkina.

This work is both difficult and dangerous. The deeper the researchers go, the longer it takes them to bring the excavated materials to the ground, and the greater the fatal danger of cave collapse. After several small-scale investigations, the researchers finally broke through the tight encirclement and reached a new area with a depth of more than 1000 meters. This achievement inspired Russian speleologists to continue their exploration, and launched an expedition every two to three months until they finally reached the bottom of the cave in 20 17, realizing the largest in-depth exploration of the cave system in the world.

Using a series of camps along the way, it took the explorers more than four days to reach the bottom of the cave with a depth of 22 12 meters. It takes about the same time to get back to the ground, so the players have to stay in it for at least a week, which is a very long time for such an extreme environment. Because of the endless darkness, cave explorers can easily break their biological rhythm, and may work at night and sleep during the day. Fortunately, communication with the ground base enables cave explorers to contact with the outside world and share their latest progress.

They had to rely on ropes for thousands of feet to crawl in suffocating pipes mixed with water and soil. The caves are almost vertically downward, and there are wells with small horizontal passages everywhere. From the depth of 800 meters, the water flowing through the small tributaries splashed in the narrow channel, making the cave very humid. The humidity is actually 100%, plus the temperature of 4 to 7, which means that explorers are easily frozen all the way.

Along the way, the expedition collected rare samples of shrimp and scorpions, and there may be new microbial species. There are also some fossils, mainly those printed on rocks, which show the life in caves millions of years ago and provide clues about how caves and surrounding mountains formed.

Pavel Demidoff, the leader of the record-keeping expedition, was one of the first people to arrive here. He described Veryovkina as "like the distant moon you glanced at", referring to the cave environment, as if on another planet. At the bottom of the cave, there is a huge maze.

Demidoff was killed in Abkhazia on August 23rd, 2020, when he was going to an undeveloped cave in the Arabica Mountains not far from Veryovkina. The 49-year-old hero died when a boulder burst at a depth of 305 meters.

Demidoff's tragic death proved the danger faced by cave explorers in their long journey. In 20 18, Demidoff's team, including Peter Liubimov, Constantine Zverev, Andrei shuvalov, yevgeny Rybka and Andrei Ziznikov, as well as national geographic photographers Robbie Shawnee and Jeff Wade, barely survived after the cave was flooded. Heavy rain will lead to water accumulation, and then suddenly break through the hole because of the large amount of water.

Despite the extremely harsh conditions, researchers continued to explore other similar caves in Veryovkina and Arabika Massive, and carried out research on various paleontology, biology and microbiology projects. Some cave creatures may be beneficial to the development of antibiotics.

Four of the deepest caves in the world were found in Arabica. In addition to Veryovkina, these caves include Krubera-Voronja (2199m), Sarma (1830m) and Snezhnaja (1760m). This is no coincidence. All these caves are on karst landform, which is a rugged landform with high altitude and contains very rich soluble thick limestone.

Karst covers 25% of the earth's surface. Where there is karst, there are caves. In fact, scientists believe that there may be tens of thousands of undiscovered caves in the world. Some of them may be deeper than Veryovkina.

Kola ultra-deep cave is the deepest cave in the world. It goes from 1970 to 1994 until it reaches an amazing depth of 12262 meters. Soviet geologists found that water is still circulating at a depth of 6.9 kilometers, which is more than three times deeper than the bottom of Veryovkina cave.

The other deepest cave in the world may be the Chevy Cave System, which is a huge underground cave group in Oaxaca, Mexico. The current there shows that it may go deep into the earth nearly 2.57 kilometers. There may be many other caves waiting for us to explore.

However, any ultra-deep caves may not be accessible from the surface and need to be drilled, provided that scientists can find them. Remote sensing technologies such as ground penetrating radar can only play a role in relatively shallow depth, and it is impossible to identify underground passages that are only a few feet wide.

However, it is worthwhile to develop new methods to find the deepest caves in the world. The caves are full of creatures, especially invertebrates and microorganisms, which can help scientists find new antibiotics and other drugs. They are also time capsules of the earth's past climate, which can help scientists improve climate models in order to better predict future trends.