Cave Depth Record Achieved Using KISS Rebreather

Expedition diver Jason Mallinson describes a record-setting dive into the Western Hemisphere’s deepest cave, using the Classic KISS rebreather.


Mexico’s Sistema Huautla is perhaps one of the most complex of the world’s deep caves. With 17 entrances and numerous independent and physically demanding deep routes, dropping nearly a mile into the earth, this dark labyrinth requires extensive rope work and multiple days of effort to reach the lower depths of the system. The last extension to the cave took place in 1994, when Dr William Stone used his self-designed CIS Lunar rebreather to pass what was then considered the terminal sump. Staging their dive from a portable platform suspended over a pool of water, the transiting a flooded tunnel and went on to discovered some 3.3km (2 miles) of new passage, but were ultimately stopped by Sump 9.(...)

Read more: UnderWaterJournal.com

Migovec 2012 Expedition: Longest Cave in Slovenia

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)

Australian divers reach record depths in caves

Australian diver David Bardi at the "habitat"
(-38 m) in the Pearse River resurgence.

A group of Australian divers has broken yet another cave diving record in the depths of the Pearse River resurgence and revealed the underwater cave system is linked to Mt Arthur's Nettlebed Cave system.

The group returned from the remote Motueka Valley river head this week after spending a fortnight exploring the intricate underwater cave system.

Diver and explorer Craig Challen pushed the human limit, reaching 221m, breaking the 194m record he set in the river cave last January and setting an Australasian record.

The Western Australian vet said delving to a dark depth felt like "a long way from home".

The 17-hour dive saw him stop four times at underwater "habitats" which were filled with trapped air. They provided a base for divers to rest and decompress before continuing their return to the surface.

80-year-old hopes to have broken cave dive record

A new world record for the oldest human ever to take part in a cave dive may have been set at Wookey Hole Caves.

John Buxton from Bedford marked his 80th birthday with a cave dive, swimming 2,000 metres underground and underwater.

He managed to reach more than 20 of the underwater chambers in the Wookey Hole Cave system.

John Buxton, who has been cave diving since 1953 is believed to be the oldest man ever to cave dive, though he said very firmly that he wasn't making any claim of this kind.

Fellow cave diver Martin Grass said: "I've spoken to people all over the world, and while there have been plenty of people open water diving into their 80s, nobody has ever heard of an octogenarian cave diver.

Mr Buxton said: "I would have liked to have reached the 22nd chamber, but I had an air leak on my jacket and had to turn back.

"The leak, in a buoyancy waistcoat made it difficult to move about underwater."

There are three chambers with air in them, and 22 chambers in total.

"I've just always liked doing it," said Mr Buxton.

"I was a caver first, and would come across these cave passages made by water and forming puddles, which are called sumps, and said that it was a shame that you couldn't explore them.

"When someone pointed out the rope leading into the water and said that people were already doing it, so it sounded like a good idea to me."

In the early days of cave diving, divers used diving suits and after the Second World War would use the re-breathers used by submariners to escape from crippled submarines.

Later Mr Buxton moved to using air tanks underwater.

For his effort in Wookey Hole Caves he used two 12-litre cylinders weighing more than 50 lbs.

Mr Buxton, who has also cave dived in the Bahamas, Florida and Mexico has no intention of hanging up his air tanks.

Source: This is Somerset

Towards the centre of the Earth expedition 2010. Krubera Voronya

Towards the centre of the Earth expedition 2010. Krubera Voronya cave in Abkhazia/Georgia. Currently the deepest cave in the world.

Photos by Niall Aidas Jolanta Laura and Jesus.

Music by And So I Watched You From Afar - 'The Voiceless' Go to their myspace site for details.

Krubera Voronya cave: dive through Kvitochka

Documentary footage of 3 Lithuanian speleologists (Saulė Pankienė, Gintautas Švedas, Aidas Gudaitis) and 1 cave diver (Vytis Vilkas) diving through "Kvitochka" siphon and getting to siphon "Dva Kapitana" in Krubera Voronya cave, 2010 August.

Dive through siphon takes about 4 minutes, but it's cropped as it's not very informative due to poor visibility.

Kiwi cavers break caving depth record

The caving world is buzzing after a caving expedition in the South Island ventured deeper into the earth than cavers anywhere in the world, ever.

The three week expedition in the Mt Arthur area near Murchison, cracked the 1000 metre mark and catapulted New Zealand's deepest cave into the Top 10 in the world.

Cracking that mark means the New Zealand cave system is not only much deeper than first thought, but also connected.

Caver Kieran McKay, who was part of the team that broke the new record, says the find has taken a long time.

"We've been looking for this for over 60 years and it's involved hundreds and hundreds of people and thousands and thousands of man-hours and people traipsing all over Mt Arthur," he says.

The latest expedition linked separate caves in the Ellis Basin system to form what will be in the Top 10 deepest caves in the world.

"We're walking into worlds that formed before mankind ever existed on this planet and our lights are lighting up the darkness for the first time and that to me is an incredible humbling and amazing feeling," says McKay.

McKay is an experienced caver, who knows the cave system well. A 10 metre fall in 1998 left him with a smashed jaw, wrecked knee and broken arm. It took him three days to be pulled out, but it never stopped him going back.

That determination has been rewarded with his team's latest find and McKay says the cave system may go even deeper.

"There's an entrance 300 to 400 metres higher up the mountain and we're hoping to connect that into the system as well," he says.

The Sparc-funded team will be heading back next summer to find out just how deep they can go.

Source: TVNZ

World's largest cave

British explorers have discovered what they claim is the world's largest cave passage, measuring 650-ft high and 500-ft wide, in Vietnamese jungle.

According to the British team, the Hang Son Doong is larger than the Deer Cave in Sarawak, Malaysia, which at more than 100 yards high and 90 yards wide is currently recognised as the world's largest cave passage.

"It is a truly amazing sized cave and one of the most significant discoveries by a British caving team. The complete survey is at present being drawn up but initial estimates show the main passage to be 200 metres (656 ft) high in places and possibly greater in some sections.

"Much of the passage width is over 100 metres (328 ft) but certain sections are over 150 metres wide (492 ft)," 'The Daily Telegraph' quoted Adam Spillane, a member of the 13-man expedition, as saying.

The British team, which has discovered the cave in mid -April with help from representatives of the Hanoi University of Science, is now in the UK to analyse its findings.

The team spent six hours trekking through the jungle to reach the cave. Climbing down into a large chamber, they had to negotiate two rivers before reaching the main passage of the Hang Son Doong.

Spillane said that the entrance to the cave was first found by a local man, Ho Khanh, in 1991. "Khanh has been a guide for the team in many expeditions to jungle to explore caves and this year he took a team to the cave which had never been entered before by anyone including local jungle men.

"This was because the entrance which is small by Vietnamese cave standards and emitted a frightful wind and noise which was due to a large underground river," he said.

Source: Zeenews

Krubera-Voronya expedition video

Australian Geologists Date World's Oldest Discovered Open Caves At 340 Million Years

The Persian Chamber in the Orient Cave: research
has dated Jenolan Caves at 340 million years old.

Cave-dating research published by Australian geologists has found that the Jenolan Caves, in central NSW, are the world's oldest discovered open caves.

In a study published in the June issue of the Australian Journal of Earth Sciences (Vol. 53, 377-405), scientists from CSIRO, the University of Sydney and the Australian Museum -- in cooperation with the Jenolan Caves Trust -- have shown that the limestone caves, which attract thousands of tourists each year, date back more than 340 million years.

Until 20 years ago most scientists thought the Jenolan Caves were no more than a few thousand years old. In 1999 geologists estimated that the caves might be between 90 and 100 million years old.

Dr Armstrong Osborne, a senior lecturer at the University of Sydney, has long suspected that the caves are older than had been widely recognised, but says he was surprised to find they dated back to the Carboniferous (290 to 354 million years ago).

"We've shown that these caves are hundreds of millions of years older than any reported date for an open cave anywhere in the world," Dr Osborne says.

"Even in geological terms, 340 million years is a very long time. To put it into context, the Blue Mountains began to form 100 million years ago; dinosaurs became extinct 65 million years ago, and Tasmania was joined to the mainland as recently as 10,000 years ago.

World Record Cave Dive - 282,6 m (927 feet) - Nuno Gomes

Updated: 16/01/2012

Gomes is a renowned cave diver and holds the official current (2012) Guinness World Record for the deepest cave dive, done in Boesmansgat cave (South Africa), to a depth of 927 feet (282.6 m), in 1996.

 

The cave is located at an altitude of 5000 feet (1550 m) above sea level, which resulted in Nuno having to decompress for an equivalent sea level dive of 1112 feet (339 m) to prevent decompression sickness ("the bends"). The total dive time was 12 hours and 15 minutes, while the descent took 15 minutes.