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08 May 2012
Vietnam's Infinite Cave
Hang Sơn Đoòng (meaning "Mountain River cave" in Vietnamese)is a cave in Phong Nha-Kẻ Bàng National Park, Bố Trạch district, Quảng Bình Province, Vietnam. The cave is located near the Laos-Vietnam border (17°27'25.88"N 106°17'15.36"E). It has a large fast-flowing underground river inside.
Hang Sơn Đoòng was found by a local man named Hồ-Khanh in 1991. The
local jungle men were afraid of the cave for the whistling sound it
makes from the underground river. It was not until 2009 that it became public after a group of British scientists from the British Cave Research Association, led by Howard and Deb Limbert, conducted a survey in Phong Nha-Kẻ Bàng from April 10 through April 14, 2009. Their progress was stopped by a large calcite wall.
According to the Limberts, this cave is five times larger than the Phong Nha cave,
previously considered the biggest cave in Vietnam. The biggest chamber
of Sơn Đoòng is more than five kilometers long, 200 meters high, and 150
meters wide. With these dimensions, Sơn Đoòng overtakes Deer Cave in Malaysia to take the title of the world's largest cave.
Hang Sơn Đoòng is the largest cave in the world. There's a jungle inside Vietnam's mammoth cavern. A skyscraper could
fit too. And the end is out of sight...
A giant cave column swagged in flowstone towers over
explorers swimming through the depths of Hang Ken, one of 20 new caves
discovered last year in Vietnam.
A half-mile block of 40-story buildings could fit inside
this lit stretch of Hang Son Doong, which may be the world's biggest
subterranean passage.
A jungle inside a cave? A roof collapse long ago in Hang
Son Doong let in light; plants thickly followed. As "Sweeny" Sewell
climbs to the surface, hikers struggle through the wryly named Garden of
Edam.
Mist sweeps past the hills of Phong Nha-Ke Bang National
Park, its 330 square miles set aside in 2001 to protect one of Asia's
largest cave systems. During the Vietnam War, North Vietnamese soldiers
hid in caves from U.S. air strikes. Bomb craters now serve as fishponds.
Going underground, expedition members enter Hang En, a
cave tunneled out by the Rao Thuong River. Dwindling to a series of
ponds during the dry months, the river can rise almost 300 feet during
the flood season, covering the rocks where cavers stand.
Headroom shrinks in the middle of Hang En as cavers pass
beneath a ceiling scalloped by eons of floodwater rushing past. The
river shortly reemerges onto the surface, then burrows into Hang Son
Doong after a few miles.
Like a petrified waterfall, a cascade of fluted
limestone, greened by algae, stops awestruck cavers in their tracks.
They're near the exit of Hang En.
Moss-slick boulders and a 30-foot drop test author Mark
Jenkins at the forest-shrouded entrance to Hang Son Doong. "Even though
these caves are huge, they're practically invisible until you're right
in front of them," Jenkins says. Hunters have found caves by spotting
winds gusting from underground openings.
Hang Son Doong's airy chambers sprout life where light
enters from above—a different world from the bare, cramped, pitch-black
spaces familiar to most cavers. Ferns and other greenery colonize
rimstone. In the jungles directly beneath roof openings, explorers have
seen monkeys, snakes, and birds.
Rare cave pearls fill dried-out terrace pools near the
Garden of Edam in Hang Son Doong. This unusually large collection of
stone spheres formed drip by drip over the centuries as calcite crystals
left behind by water layered themselves around grains of sand,
enlarging over time.
Navigating an algae-skinned maze, expedition organizers
Deb and Howard Limbert lead the way across a sculpted cavescape in Hang
Son Doong. Ribs form as calcite-rich water overflows pools.
Like a castle on a knoll, a rock formation shines beneath
a skylight in Hang Son Doong. A storm had just filled the pool,
signaling that exploring season was coming to an end.
The trickiest challenge for the expedition team was to
find a way over the Great Wall of Vietnam, an overhanging mass of
flowstone that blocked the way deep inside Hang Son Doong. Climbing
specialists "Sweeny" Sewell and Howard Clarke here work on anchoring
bolts to the slippery, porous rock to support the weight of climbers
using ropes. Once over the wall, the expedition team discovered a second
entrance into the cave.
"It sounded like a roaring train," said "Sweeny" Sewell,
describing the noise a second before a waterfall exploded into Hang Son
Doong through the Watch Out for Dinosaurs doline, or sinkhole opening. A
rare dry-season downpour produced the thundering runoff. Were the
cavers scared of drowning? "Maybe if it were a smaller cave," said
expedition leader Howard Limbert, "but not here."
In the dry season, from November to April, a caver can
safely explore Hang Ken, with its shallow pools. Come the monsoon, the
underground river swells and floods the passages, making the cave
impassable
Taking the only way in, a climber descends 225 feet by
rope into Hang Loong Con. A survey party discovered the cave in 2010,
hoping it would connect with the enormous Hang Son Doong. A wall of
boulders soon blocked the way, but a powerful draft indicated that a
large cavern lay on the other side.
Streams of light from the surface unveil
stalagmites fat and thin on the floor of Hang Loong Con. Cavers called
the new find the Cactus Garden.
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