Researchers working in the Czech Republic have located the deepest underwater cave ever found on Earth.
The geological formation — known as Hranická Propast — extends down to a staggering 1,325 feet. That is 39 feet deeper than the previously deepest known cave on Earth, the Pozzo del Merro cave in Italy.
Polish divers first explored Hranická Propast in 1999. Though they did not have the resources to fully investigate the area, the team believed limestone deposits they found at the formation suggested a much deeper system underneath. This prompted them to seek additional funding to further explore the area.
During the past two years, the team performed a series of dives with the help of a remotely operated underwater vehicle (ROV), which allowed them to accurately measure the cave’s depth.
When lead researcher Krzysztof Starnawski first descended 656 feet into the cave, he noticed a narrow opening that led to another vertical tunnel. Using the robot, he found that the tunnel ran out at 1,260 feet, just 26 feet shy of Pozzo del Merro’s record length. However, on a return trip, the narrow passage had opened, allowing the probe to move down to a depth of 1,214 feet before debris from a collapsed passage blocked its path.
On Tuesday, the team finally recorded the cave’s actual depth when the ROV managed to squeeze through various narrow passages and explore the tunnel’s full length.
“There had been some dives done by the oil industry to such depths (so-called ‘saturation diving’), but they last approximately a month, surface to surface,” said Marcin Jamkowski, a member of the expedition team and an adventure filmmaker, according to Live Science. “This can never be done in the cave like this one, so the obvious choice was to send the robot where the man can’t go.”
The probe uncovered a lot of debris at the bottom of the cave, including logs, branches, and fallen trees. This suggests the chamber may have changed shape over time because the shafts are currently too narrow to allow such refuse to fall down from the cave’s entrance.
While many of the passages are a tight squeeze, the cave itself is quite large. It appears to follow a fault line that has been eaten away by hot water coming up from a deep spring. The team plans to further explore this system on a series of planned future expeditions.
“We wanted to beat the Italian record. We succeeded and now we have the magic number of 404 metres,” said Miroslav Lukas of the Czech Speleological Society, according to Yahoo News. “I don’t know if it’s by five metres or a hundred, but the depth is set to change.”
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