I have the great pleasure of announcing that the JSPDT (Caving Section of the Tolmin Alpine Club) and ICCC (Imperial College Caving Club) have successfully connected System Migovec and System Vrtnarija during the Sledi Vetra 2012 expedition.The combined system is now 24.9 km long and 975 m deep.
This makes it by far the longest known cave in Slovenia, in a system where the majority of passage length is at depths of greater than 500 m.
The connection was made at a depth of ~650 m, during the last pushing trip of the expedition. A climb in the Queens Bed Chamber started last year was completed (named Apollo) and led to 420m of passage (The Milky Way) this was then pushed further to eventually reach a PSS from 1998 in Waterloo, SysMig (see Caves and Caving 84 p18 'The Northern Line', or The Hollow Mountain p100 [1]).
Some of the Slovenes have been working on Migovec every year since the 1970s, ICCC since 1994. There are perhaps more than 50 cavers of Migovec out there who contributed to this enormous project, all of whom share in the enjoyment of this moment.
[1] The Hollow Mountain, the expedition report to 2006 is available free of charge online here:
http://union.ic.ac.uk/rcc/caving/slovenia/intro/slov_intro.php
Interim reports & surveys for the subsequent years may be found on the individual expedition pages linked above.
We gave a recent extended talk on the 2009-2011 at our University, the slides are online & may be a useful introduction / catch up if you caught one of our Hidden Earth lectures:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/86098004/2012-03-Slovenia-Caving-ICCC-Explo-Soc-Talk#
Find out more at http://union.ic.ac.uk/rcc/caving/slovenia/slov2012/
Via Jarvist (Imperial College Caving Club)