Wakulla Springs
Here's a series of seven clips on Wakulla by Chuck Ford featuring the work of the Woodville Karst Plain Project and the Wakulla Watershed Coalition.
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Tuesday, June 05, 2007
Ultima Patagonia 2006
Excellent 40 page PDF here on Federation Francaise de Speleologie's 2006 expedition to Patagonia's Madre de Dios archipelago. Scroll down for info on the 2008 expedition.
Monday, April 09, 2007
Lifeblood of the Maya
The Yucatan's first European colonizers depended on cenotes as well, and a model example is found in Valladolid.
At the Convent of San Bernardino de Siena, a 16th-century Spanish monastery built atop a cenote, the founders strived to create a self-sustaining community with sequestered vegetable gardens, an orchard and water below.
... full text here.
Monday, March 26, 2007
Alexander Caverns Gallery
Still working on the photos...
Monday, March 19, 2007
Under the surface: A cave on South Street recently resurfaced
Via the Frederick News Post...
The workers who found the cave in the late 1800s were quarrying rock for an elevator company in a building on South Carroll Street which now houses the Mudd Puddle, the building's owner, Joan Jenkins, said.
Those workers found the cave accidentally.
Now a developer is searching for the cave...
... rest is here.
Friday, February 02, 2007
Divernet Articles
7 speleo related articles from Divernet...
Thursday, January 25, 2007
Eight Rivers Safe Development
Tom Shipley, the Sharp descendant presently keeping watch over his family's heritage in Pocahontas County, West Virginia.
Eight Rivers Safe Development, Inc. is a West Virginia nonprofit corporation organized for charitable and educational purposes. We encourage and advocate the conservation and protection of karst, caves, and karst landscapes, and promote safe development on karst terrains.
8 Rivers is a true grass-roots effort, formed as a coalition of cavers, anglers and conservation/watershed groups who were hastened into action upon learning of an ill-conceived proposal to construct a 1.5 million gallon-per-day sewage treatment plant upon a karst floodplain and trout stream near Slatyfork, Pocahontas County, West Virginia.
The goal of 8 Rivers is threefold:
- To cultivate an appreciation for the beauty and rarity of caves, springs and karst natural resources in the Slatyfork area and their unique, fragile and symbiotic relationship with our famous rivers.
- To inform and educate of the environmental risks and costs inherent in development upon karst.
- To prevent this disaster-in-the-making from going forward.
... here's a link to some surface footage of the Elk River Elana and I took last summer while in the area. Keep in mind everything featured in the clip: the upstream insurgences, the riverbeds, the springs, not to mention everything underground through which all of the water flows will be effected, best-case and worst-case. It would all be immediately downstream from the proposed treatment facility.
... 8RIVERS SAFE DEVELOPMENT.COM
Monday, January 15, 2007
Caves hold climate clues
Last week, Montañez and Oster put on boots and hardhats for their latest plunge into the depths of Black Chasm, near the town of Volcano, one in a string of four Sierra foothill caves operated by a company called Sierra Nevada Recreation Corp. Black Chasm was designated a national natural landmark in 1976, largely on the strength of an unusually rich array of twisty ceiling formations known as helictites.
... rest is here.
Monday, November 06, 2006
Titan Cave: Potholers discover UK's biggest (vertical drop) cave
UPDATE: Here's the video that aired on BBC1 last night.
The above will lead you to the most recent feature on BBC1. Here's a link to a different clip shot during the same time. It's shorter than the original clip but still pretty cool.
While Titan is the deepest vertical drop in the U.K., the cave with the largest overall vertical extent is Ogof Ffynnon Ddu at 308 meters. Ogof Ffynnon Ddu is 60 meters deeper than Peak/Speedwell Cavern, the system within which Titan is located.
Here's a post featuring a location popular with cavers and base-jumpers... Golondrinas, a 376 m/1240' pit in Mexico. That's 236m/779' more than Titan. More Golondrinas base footage at the top of this post...
Croatia's Velebita Cave (scroll down for photos) holds the record for the longest uninterrupted vertical drop at 513m/1693'. That's 6.66m/22' more than the tallest skyscraper in the world... Taipei 101. Direct link to a photo of the Taipei tower. Nature rules.
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The cave in Derbyshire's Peak District, known as Titan, is estimated to be a massive 459ft (140m) from floor to ceiling, beating the previous record holder, Gaping Gyhll in the Yorkshire Dales, by almost 200ft (60m).
It was discovered by Dave Nixon and a group of Peak cavers near another huge cavern, Leviathan, after he found an old account in a university library
... rest is here.
... here's the page from BBC1's "Inside Out" show mentioned in the article above. The current episode appears to be the last episode, fridays? Maybe todays show, the one with the Titan footage, will be accessible tommorrow. Or it might be up on YouTube already.
... here's a nice photo by Robbie Shone of Dave Nixon at the top of the drop. More Titan shots here, here, here, here, here and here as well.
... more images by Mr. Shone.
... here's one looking up by Paul Deakin dated 1999.
... screen shots of the BBC1 footage.
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