It barreled down with a crushing, suffocating force. The tremendous weight of the water pummeled Shone. He clipped his ascenders into the rope, took a deep breath, put his head down, and started climbing. He looked up and saw the raging waterfall of the flood pouring over them. That shaft was now completely filled with water.Īt the end of the traverse, Shone reached the vertical ropes. He reached a precarious traverse, which had formerly been above an airy shaft, eight meters wide and 20 meters deep. Shone headed toward the ropes that led up and out. If we just hang around, we’re all going to die.’” “When Petr turned and looked at me, his face was white,” says Shone. This time, he saw water rising up so fast it was jostling off the walls. No more than five minutes after Demidov had left, Lyubimov went back to look down into the small hole near the tent. They hoped to gauge how high the water table had actually risen. He couldn’t see any water, but given that the flood pulse had already been raging for over two hours with no signs of abating, it presented enough of a concern that he told team leader Pavel Demidov about the noise.ĭemidov agreed with Lyubimov's concern and enlisted the assistance of several others to join him in checking on a nearby siphon. Then Petr Lyubimov happened to notice a gurgling sound coming out of a small hole in the ground adjacent to their tent. They figured they were in the safest spot possible. Their camp was well protected and staying dry. Their camp was safely adjacent to the main vertical shaft that was currently spewing an unfathomable volume of water. Shone wasn’t initially very concerned about the flood pulse, despite its scary thunder. The ensuing flood pulse can last a few minutes, even a few hours, but it eventually subsides. Heavy rains can cause water to collect, then, because of the volume, suddenly burst through cave openings. When the flood pulse struck, the cavers had been underground for seven days total-a long time to be in such an extreme environment.Ĭavers deal with flood pulses all the time. They tapped into the cable wire the Russians had installed for these very purposes and sent a warning to their friends below. On the way out, they had reached a camp halfway up the cave, at 1,300 meters below the surface, when they saw the flood pulse. Roman Zverev and Natalia Sizikova had left early to catch a flight home. “The flood was just something that happened at the end.” “The real reason of this expedition was to continue the exploration of the world’s deepest cave,” says Shone. The team had already spend three days bivied here, launching explorations into new corridors, collecting invertebrate specimens, and creating photographs.
The 2,200-meter camp-the cave’s lowest camp-is a flat, sandy spot in a horizontal tunnel. The cavers had descended thousands of feet of ropes, crawled through water- and mud-choked siphons, and squeezed themselves and heavy packs of gear through the most tortuous, improbable cracks. Reaching Veryovkina’s low point took four days.
“It's such a beautiful-but at the same time, eerie-location.” “A beautiful turquoise lake, about 15 meters long and 8 meters wide, surrounded by jet-black limestone,” Shone says, describing Veryovkina’s terminal siphon.
#DEEP SPACE ENDEAVOR TORRENT SERIES#
“The most enormous torrent of white water appeared out of this hole, and I just stood opened-mouthed at the sight of this huge white wall of water entering our little home,” he says.Īfter achieving this record, the Perovo-Speleo team returned in September to explore a number of promising horizontal leads at the bottom of Veryovkina collect samples of rare, possibly new species of shrimp and scorpion and leverage Shone’s photographic skills to create a series of still images documenting the entire cave, including its extraordinary terminus. As he turned his headlamp toward the noise, the food nearly fell out of his mouth. Like his teammates, Shone was dressed in fleece under-gear, his breakfast bowl still in his hands. Hearing the thunder of the flood pulse coming, Shone and the other cavers rushed out of their group tent. Shone had just started breakfast, a pasta-and-meat dish prepared in advance with vacuum-sealed ingredients by Pavel Demidov, the expedition leader, world-class Russian caver, and culinary enthusiast. “It got louder and louder,” says Robbie Shone, a National Geographic cave photographer. The entire cave began to shake as if by earthquake. The rumble grew, like a freight train hurtling through a tunnel. Half an hour after receiving a warning call from two teammates at a high camp, eight cavers stationed at the bottom of the world’s deepest cave heard the roar of floodwaters.
0 kommentar(er)
