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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."
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
seeing the extreme conditions man will venture into to quench an unstoppable curiosity.
Or to get chicks. Some people will do anything to impress chicks.
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)
It's wrapped in extreme amounts of emotive narrative, but that story just describes how something can go horribly wrong if you do extremely dangerous things without planning them properly, and don't follow established rules. A diver's (Deon) dead body, that's been there for years, found in a deep cave, is recovered for no particular reason than to be heroic. The equipment they use is new, improperly tested and mostly "home-brew" for the situation they want to use it in. Some of it breaks.
The body-recovery is then portrayed as something brave and necessary, instead of just plain silly to go EXACTLY where a previous expert, experienced diver has died and whose body is STILL stuck, and as a single diver (with only backup crews who won't dive that far down) try, on your own, to recover the body. Something killed the original diver, and you're going to have to stand there and deal with whatever that was in order to free the body.
To quote, when they reviewed the footage of that *solo* diver who died going in to recover a body that was already *trapped* in place, the video (recovered only by sheer chance, and recorded on bog-standard video camera in a home-brew housing) showed the body floated. "This was totally unexpected. Deon, as it turned out, was not completely skeletal, and he was no longer stuck in the silt. Instead of decomposing, his corpse had mummified into a soaplike composition that gave it mass and neutral buoyancy. And for some reason--no one has an explanation--the body had become unstuck from the mud as soon as Shaw started working on it. "The fact that the body was now loose, and not pinned to the ground, was not one of the scenarios that we had thought about," Shirley sighs. "The body was not meant to be floating." It's a lot easier to slip a bag over an immobile body than a body floating and rolling in front of you at 886 feet."
Amazing that a body comes loose when you're disturbing it in order to loosen it. And amazing that a body isn't completely skeletal given that recovery of bodies in every extreme has shown some to be remarkably well-preserved.
After the video shows the recovery diver's breathing rate increasing (and he's very experienced in dealing with that and the intoxication of breathing diving gases): "Watching the video with a clear head, it is hard not to wonder why Shaw didn't just turn around right then and abandon the dive." The "attempted recovery dive" that he was stating when he was on the surface. And he's quoted earlier as saying "Better one dead than two".
But he pushes on: "He keeps working to control the body, letting go of his cave light so he can use both hands... Shaw has been at it for two minutes, and the cave line is seemingly everywhere. It snags on his cave light, and Shaw pauses to clear it. At this, Shirley and Herbst bridled. A cave diver should never let gear float loose. "It's a recipe for disaster," says Shirley, who will always regret not being present when Shaw told Hiles (ON THE SURFACE!) he would put the light to the side at times. "Do not do that," he would have warned him."
Then the video shows more of the hazard that the diver was in: "Suddenly he loses his footing on the sloping bottom. He scrambles back to the body in a cloud of silt." (the bottom where the body was already trapped and claimed its first victim).
Afterwards, doubt is cast on his abilities by companions - extremely experienced, cave-divers - but the author conveniently tucks it away: "But he also wonders whether Shaw should have done more buildup dives to increase his tolerance for narcosis--much the way a climber will try to acclimatize to altitude--and his ability to recognize when it reaches dangerous levels. "When he started putting the body in the bag and it didn't work, he should have immediately turned around and left," Gomes (the only person to have successfully dived that cave that far) says. "I didn't think it was worth the risk of a diver losing his life to recover the remains of Deon Dreyer," he says flatly."
Arrogance,
Cave diving deaths are all preventable by the simple method of not going cave-diving because it is a fucking insane hobby, so you could argue they're more akin to suicide than accidental death.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it