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The Search For the Mount Everest of Caves
NoMeansYes writes "An interview with James Tabor, author of the new best-selling book Blind Descent, introduces a pair of accomplished scientists — American Bill Stone and Ukranian geologist Alexander Klimchouk — who are the two most prominent figures in extreme caving. Both have figured prominently in the ongoing quest to discover the deepest cave on earth. Tabor describes what conditions are like inside supercaves like Cheve (-4,869 feet) and Krubera (-7,188 feet), before discussing Stone and his far-reaching technological innovations. These include the Posideon Discovery Rebreather and NASA's ENDURANCE. Extreme caving probably won't remain underground (so to speak) much longer, however. The article notes that James Cameron is planning to release a 3D film next year about extreme cave divers."
Oh not again!!
any underground cities ruled by a matriarchal society of scantily clad spider-worshipers?
Features blue characters much like his last film Avatar, however in this case it's due to a lack of oxygen.
Something as simple as stirring up some dust can mean death to a cave diver. It takes a special kind of person (nut) to do this. I watched a few specials on this and how easy it is to die. All I've got to say is that it must take a pair the size of the the former twin towers. I'm not fearful of enclosed spaces in the slightest, but this is just insane. On top of that, if you manage to get that deep, you have to account for the trip back, meaning if you exceed your air supply by getting lost in dirty water, or any other number of potential gotchas, you could easily end up overstaying your welcome and just not have enough time to get back out again.
I could actually see myself paying for a feature film about this. Not out of an interest in doing it myself, but seeing the extreme conditions man will venture into to quench an unstoppable curiosity.
Is that involved for extreme caving ?
I wonder what Freud would say about such "extreme caving"?
The articles quite interesting, new antibiotics , a rebreather letting someone say underwater for 10 -12 hours at a time and then theres the nasa mission to europa...
making a movie is the least interesting thing mentioned.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
Looks like Hollywood acknowledges that their movies are too superficial.
Jon Stewart interviewed the author a month back - http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-june-15-2010/james-tabor
No Sig for you.!
and you could really see it in avatar: all that beautiful day glo flora was obviously inspired by your average earth coral reef
and cameron has said avatar ii is going to be an aquatic adventure on pandora:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/herocomplex/2010/04/james-cameron-talks-the-enironment-the-avatar-sequel-and-more.html
considering how cameron's diving hobbies inspire his creative works (look at titanic and the abyss), i welcome whatever comes out of the creative ferment of his mind from his interest in deep caves. perhaps the abyss ii? some sort of horror movie? avatar iii will be in a galactic cave? who knows...
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Most of the world uses metric, and it now it is just plain distracting to articles in feet, miles etc.
Here's is a suggestion for Google: Have a translation option that converts these pages into metric on the fly!
46137
Because it sure sounds like it....
Will slashdot's far reach cause more people to get stuck in caves? People are always diving in caves. People seeking new passages through small holes get stuck all the time.
Will the movie result in an uptick in caving deaths? 60 percent of cave deaths in Florida are related to cave diving. I've always wanted to go caving, except that everything I read about it, is about someone dying.
Push-Pull.
They've gone down 2km. That's still about half the depth of the 3.9km TauTona mine, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TauTona and far short of the 11km of the Challenger http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Challenger_Deep. Now if there were some caves below the oceanic trenches...
Protoplasm. Quiet Protoplasm. I like quiet protoplasm.
I second the statement, "I'm not claustrophobic, but this is insane". It's the sheer un-rescue-ability of it all, if you simply get wedged, that gets to me.
A young man died cave diving in the Rockies not far from Calgary a few years back. The awful bit was that he got delayed coming back, wasn't sure how far it was, went to the limit of his air, turned the little knob that gives you the last five minutes, and used that time scratching out a goodbye to his family on the air tank.
Right around one more corner from where he would have seen the flashlights of his friends waiting for him.
Lessons I took from it:
1) Cave diving is insane.
2) If you're ever certain you're at that last moment of your life, nevertheless spend it trying to survive. Your family actually knew you loved them already.
I am with Linus on this one.
I totally agree with him on this.
The article notes that James Cameron is planning to release a 3D film next year about extreme cave divers.
And the year after that will see "Cavatar"
A man falls in love with a female from a tribe of green, subterranean lizard people, and helps her fight off the evil white American oppressors who want to drill her (wink wink) home for sub-crustal oil.
considering how cameron's diving hobbies inspire his creative works (look at titanic and the abyss), i welcome whatever comes out of the creative ferment of his mind from his interest in deep caves. perhaps the abyss ii? some sort of horror movie?
Maybe he can go spelunking in a library, and learn how to make an original plot and put that "3D" concept to work with his character construction.
galactic cave?
o_O
by random overly negative internet trolls of extremely successful obviously talented people to be funny. thanks for the laugh
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The endurance device looks really cool as an autonomous submersible that can find it's way back to the transducer dropped through the opening in the ice. Here are a few problems;
Getting to Europa the package needs to set down in an area where there is a "lead" in the ice where it is thinner. Trying to drill or melt your way through a kilometer of ice would be a serious challenge that we would even have a problem with today (an opening the size of Endurance).
To make a hole would either require an automated drilling system or a nuclear power source to melt it's way down to below the ice. Since RTG (radioisotope thermal generators) require a significant amount of plutonium or radioactive thorium to generate even a small amount of thermal energy it would require a "real" reactor to create enough heat to melt a hole. As the reactor and ENDURANCE melts their way down they would deploy a tether back up to the surface. As they melt downwards the water will freeze above them, leaving the tether encased in ice.Once they break free of the ice layer and make it into the depths of Europa's ocean the reactor can be powered back and act as a docking station, recharging station and communications hub for the ENDURANCE explorer. Data would be relayed back up the tether to a satellite relay station to send data back up to an orbiter.
With a "down hole" power source the ENDURANCE probe could carry out extended exploration missions down to the crush depth of the submursiable and missions could last for months (aka the Mars rovers).
Tisha Hayes
I read Blind Descent and had mixed feelings. While I have the utmost respect for the folks who enter caves of this nature (aka "supercaves", a term not used in the caving community), the author plays it for maximum drama.
The truth is that there is a long continuum of people who explore caves, and this book is just profiling the people at the highest of the high end, but at the end of the day, they want the same thing as most other techno-geeks: to be the first to find something really cool. (They just happen to have the physical, mental, and financial chops to actually have a shot at it. Not to mention luck, in large quantities.)
Plumb it's depths with your tongues, you fucking propeller-heads. Plumb it and fucking like it!
Enjoy that McDonald's burger, and wash it down with a Bud Light! Popular=best!
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
So they are playing nethack... and getting paid for it!
what's next...
Cameron Presents "Colonoscopy" In 3d IMAX, Coming to a theater near you 2013...
I thought the 2 most prominent in extreme caving were Arne Saknussum and Professor Lidenbruch
...describes how something can go horribly wrong in a cave dive (in this case, Bushman's Hole, one of the deepest freshwater caves in the world) even with the best planning efforts of experts in the field. It's a long, but incredibly sad, read. If you want to read something really haunting, Dave Shaw's website is still online. The video is out there too (aired on ABC in 2005). I leave the video links as an exercise to the reader. It's not something I really want to dig up again.
its a democratic ideal: in a meritocracy of cultural output, whatever rises to the top as most popular is automatically the best. its the only objective measurement possible
to say there is some other measurement of quality is to say that random rules according to some clique of self-appointed arbiters of quality is something to be respected. on what basis? show me the objective scientific determination of quality. there is none, just whim and fancy and fashionable trendiness. whatever appeals the most to the masses, is automatically the most superior of cultural output. that is the an ironclad truth because its the only objective truth. everything other measurement of quality is subjective and therefore flawed
of course, various subcultures have their own lists of what is superior in quality. but the likes and dislikes of various subcultures are not superior to the masses, despite the arrogance and assumed sense of superiority of those various subcultures
populism rules. everything else is cliquishness, classism, arrogance, and bullshit
so continue shitting all over one of the most successful directors in all of cinema. its really impressive, and utterly meaningless. you're such a respectable authority, oh random ultranegative internet troll
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The AUV that will be used to explore Europa will need to be much smaller than the ENDUANCE AUV, the large vehicle size is mostly for prototyping software and hardware. Also it allows room for an accurate inertial measurement system and relatively large science payload. The ice penetrating robot concept is currently being prototyped using power over fiber. The eventual Europa vehicle will, most likely, require an RTG to melt through the ice and power the AUV for months / years.
If funded this project will be able to answer one of the most important scientific questions of our lifetime: if there is life present outside places other than Earth and if life evolved in parallel on Europa and Earth (e.g. DNA / RNA strands are significantly different from each other or some other encoding method is used).
They call them spelunkers because that's the sound that you make when you fall into a chasm filled with water.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Exploring caves is the last adventure left to the proverbial "common man". Everything is mapped and surveyed except caves. Even if you climb a mountain as a first ascent, someone has photographed it and its height is known. There is no technology that allows to survey caves without going there and that is the excitement and fun of it. You can do it big as Bill Stone of you can find a few meters in a local cave and you can do it according your technical and physical ability. Just join the local Grotto and you have that chance! Nothing beats entering a passage where no other human being has walked before and where your light illuminates formations that nobody has seen before. You can do this only in space and on the bottom of the ocean but the costs and technology needed for that is beyond the reach of hobbyists.
There will never be the ultimate deepest cave as we know the highest mountain as there are no means of knowing this until all caves are explored. Estimates place the ratio of explored caves at some 5% of total caves. Some have not even an entrance... Of course, we know the theoretical limit which is the height difference of the limestone bedding that houses the cave but there might always be a higher entrance or a sump or something else
The reason why caving is not as popular with viewers is that it really is not a spectator sport. All you see is some cavers departing into a deep hole. Comparing this to seeing mountaineers where you can see the mountain, the cliff and where you can admire the challenge you have no such chance with a cave. And if you're not a caver you can not imagine the challenge, the joy, the cold and the misery and the excitement.
I'm reading this article and this sounds a lot like the mountain climbing movie the North Face (2008) aka Nordwand (German) that I would highly recommend watching because the real-life story of the climbers parallels the events in this article.
This whole extreme climbing thing is very dangerous whether it is going up mountains or going down caves because any little incident and not even an accident usually turns out fatal later on, even when it is something out of your control such as unexpected critical equipment failure.
Spelling, eh?
Boring git. Go crawl back into the hole you came from!
Gunfire, naturally.
What are you saying? That nobody likes Ferraris?
Read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scuba_diving#Effects_of_breathing_high_pressure_gas
Every SCUBA diver who is not enclosed in armour (some are) breathe gas at ambient pressure. As you can see in the link above, there are various risks associated with deep diving, but the truly limiting factor are the effects of the various gases at depth. Helium and hydrogen are used to replace oxygen and nitrogen to some extent, but they come with their own set of problems. All other gases are too heavy and/or toxic and will kill you in the short or long run. Argon is the only one light enough to be breathed, but it's a _massive_ hallucinogenic.
Too much oxygen: Cramps, reduced field of vision up to and including temporal blindness. Damage to cell tissue if exposed for prolonged time (starting at 8-24 hours, depending on who you ask)
Too much nitrogen: You become stupid. The effect is gone the second you go above your personal depth limit (of the day). Also, your metabolic rate goes through the roof. You feel your entire body panicking and need to fight to stay calm. Those effects become less if you dive deep on air regularly.
Too much helium: HPNS. Your nervous system goes into overdrive; often accompied by shivering.
Too much hydrogen: I think it was narcotic, if less so than nitrogen. As it's not really used in non-professional diving I don't know too much about it. Although it's cheaper than helium, it likes to go boom. Pair that with high-pressure oxygen and the tiniest fleck of grease or oil anywhere will make everything explode all by itself.
Various side effects like helium being able to get out of solution easier, forcing you to ascend even more slowly etc pp also come into play.
Also, as any caver will tell you, unless you _know_ a cave has constant supply of fresh air, you better bring your own gas. Your body detects higher-than-normal levels of CO_2, not the absence of O_2. Under the right conditions, a lung-full of zero (or less than 12%) oxygen gas will ensure that you are unconscious before you hit the ground. After that, you suffocate and die, but at least you won't know it.
Whoever modded you insightful has never seen a proper SCUBA diver. It's the least sexy sport, bar none.
Unless you build a pee valve into your dry suit, the only way to take a leak in a dry-suit are diapers. Yes, diapers.
Add the fact that you need to stay hydrated very well and that cold water will make your body pull blood into the torso. This, in turn, makes your bladder work overtime. Being perfectly still most of the time during ascent and the nice bubbly noises all around you adds extra fun!
"These include the Posideon Discovery Rebreather and NASA's ENDURANCE." POSEIDON.
As the leading diving instructor/regulator/certification organization in the US and several other countries, I was surprised to not see PADI as one of the organizations which can certify you for the rebreather. Way to go, guys.
3d for this, 3d for that, really , we need 3d like we need a third nipple...useless, especially for something like a documentary....
I tend to think hollywood just makes all these movies on purpose to waste money when we have a real problem with
our planet (oil spill) that could use all the help we can give....seems pointless to go to the movies when our planet is dying, and we are doing almost nothing for it...
159 comments, as of this writing, and not a *single* Colossal Cave reference? Narry an XYZZY to be found anywhere here? And you call yourselves geeks and nerds. Why, back in my day....now get off my lawn!
That said, I did a little bit, a very little bit, of cave diving in Hawaii, and while you have to trust your equipment completely when underwater, there was always (to me) the comfort that "escape" is just going straight up. In a cave, you don't even have that. It was quite unnerving and, while I'll always say I had a good time, I was glad when I was back on the surface, climbing into the boat.
of all time, no more no less."
its status as highest grossing movie of all time also means it is automatically the highest quality movie of all time
simply because every other measure of quality you can present to me is subjective. using economic response as a measure of quality is the only objective measure we have
"Think for yourself. Subjective assessments are fuzzy and unclean."
you are bouncing my words to you back at me. that's what i'm saying to you: subjectivity is useless. objectivity is the only valid tool to measure quality. and therefore, objectively, economic response is the only valid tool we have to measure quality
"It's also widely derided for its lackluster characterizations and terrible writing"
you just broke your own rules about subjectivity
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
i just wish that next time you evangelize about caving/ spelunking, that you put a huge asterisk at the bottom of your sales pitch and explore some of the many easy ways you can wind up very dead in a cave (lost, drowned, asphyxiated, stuck, buried, frozen, steamed, etc.)
enthusiasm is good, but enthusiasm and caution is what is required for caving/ spelunking. otherwise, if there is a rash of deaths in caves from clueless passionate noobs, authorities may outlaw the practice to amateurs, and that defeats the enthusiasm in your words above
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
in true ad&d/ mmorpg fashion, real life caves also involve hordes of subterranean creatures
did you ever wonder where all these cave dwellers come from? in an interesting symbiosis, those who most often play ad&d/ mmorpgs are already living subterraneously in their mom's basement. and after years they grow pale from lack of sun, derive an ability to subsist on day glo orange subterranean food sources like nachos/ fungus, lose the ability to communicate with surface dwellers- beginning to asocially and atavistically attack them mercilessly without provocation (usually as mindlessly negative trolls on internet forums), and after a few more years of evolution, they turn into the very same cave fodder they dispatched in their ad&d/ mmorpg campaigns
so don't get them to leave their mom's basements. we need something to slay to make real life caving as exciting as the virtual versions
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
going into mother earth's forbidden secret hidden dangerous cave
so what you are saying is that going caving may later lead to an opportunity to go... caving
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Disclaimer: The mechanism is the same, but the numbers are prolly off. Also, red blood cells are good at keeping oxygen; my calculation assumes dilution in liquids, not proper blood.
Again: The figures are off, but this is the correct mechanism.
Let's assume you are breathing normal air at 1 bar.
1 bar * 21% oxygen = 0.21 bar oxygen
As you know, you exhale about 17% oxygen; let's assume your oxygen level in returning blood is about 13% (I am not sure, sorry. Yet that fits the 12% figure from earlier). As your body needs about a minute to pump all 5 liters of blood through your body when at rest, you arrive at the usual maximum of one minute. Though again, the rising panic you feel when you hold your breath is rising level of CO_2, not dimishing O_2.
Now, take a lung-full of 0% oxygen. Your blood arrives with 13% oxygen in it and leaves with 6.5%. As your blood takes the fast (and thick) lane to your brain, the effect happens fast.
To all doctors etc: If you have better figures, _please_ correct me.
To anyone speaking German: http://www.gtuem.org/984/Tauchmedizin/O2-Mangel.html
Babelfish: http://babelfish.yahoo.com/translate_url?doit=done&tt=url&intl=1&fr=bf-home&trurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.gtuem.org%2F984%2FTauchmedizin%2FO2-Mangel.html&lp=de_en&btnTrUrl=Translate
My assumption in saying you will be crushed is because I assumed you would be using a pressurized suit because this will get you deeper than pressurized gases. Only an idiot would try to use SCUBA to dive to those depths because of the toxic effects of the gases under pressure.
I assumed a rigid suit which gets you deeper than gases - so you have a choice of being crushed later or poisoned sooner.
You would not be crushed. Your body largely consists of fluids, which are hardly compressible.
However, as you point out gases become toxic at high pressure and so the technique used for deep dives is a rigid suit to maintain a lower pressure environment around the diver. No such suit can survive to such depths hence you would be crushed by the suit collapsing around you and compressing your chest cavity.
For some reason I assumed "extreme cave diving" was like base jumping, free falling down into the depths of a huge chasm. Took me quite a few comments to realise it meant diving as in scuba diving...
It was a Big Bang Theory reference made in jest. How did Slashdot not get this?