The Hunt Is on for the World's Deepest Cave in the Oaxaca Region of Mexico Stephen Ornes - New Scientist
go to original December 22, 2015

How low can you go? Dedicated deep cavers plumb the depths for an answer, and a newly announced expedition may just get to the bottom of it all.

For decades, cavers have competed informally to find the world’s deepest cave, pushing the boundaries of science along the way. It’s a perpetual quest – they can never truly know if they have found the absolute deepest. Bragging rights have bounced from cave to cave, but since 2004 the record has been 2191 metres, held by the Krubera Cave in the western Caucasus mountains, which is also home to the world’s deepest land animal, a springtail.

But Bill Stone may be about to break the record. The veteran caver and inventor has announced that he is planning a 2017 expedition to the Chevé Cave system, a sprawling supercave in the Oaxaca region of Mexico, whose tortuous tunnels underlie an area twice the size of Manhattan.

It’s not just the thrill of breaking records that drives exploration – scientific inquiry also matters. Caves are little-understood but important component of karst aquifers, which provide drinking water to hundreds of millions of people. Their steady climates also make them promising hunting grounds for well-preserved fossils, and mineral deposits can provide records of past changes in climate. For biologists, they promise to reveal new – and often bizarre - species.

“To me, and to most others on the team, Chevé is the world’s most fascinating exploration puzzle,” says Stone. “It’s the last terrestrial frontier.”

Stone isn’t alone in thinking Chevé may break the depth record. “It’s still possible that the deepest cave will be in the Americas, even deeper than Krubera,” says Bill Steele, another veteran caver. He is now co-leading a series of expeditions to Sistema Huautla, a vast cave system that lies within sight of Chevé, on the opposite side of a canyon carved by the Santo Domingo River. Sistema Huautla is the current deepest cave in North America and drops some 1545 metres from its entrances.

Read the rest at New Scientist

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