See videos & photo links to left of article
Ah, yes; the Naica cave. Amazing, isn’t it?
I read about it last year, truly fascinating, I’m think I have a bookmark at the office to the website of the people that are exploring it. I’m too sleepy to read the National Geographic article right now, but on the proyect webpage they describe how they carry out the exploration. The suits they use are actually filled with ice so they don’t bake in the cave, still they can only stay 30 or 40 minutes in there. It’s a very pretty kind of hell indeed.
Superman is gonna be pissed when he finds them poking around in the fortress of solitude.
Holy . . . crap . . . truly other-worldly beauty. Thanks for linking.
Yes, I saw that in Nat Geo earlier. The photo linked to in the OP looks like it was photoshopped, or a CGI shot from some fantasy movie where people have been shrunk to the size of ants.
Agreed. Honestly I think I would have mentally filed this away as “a definite 'shop” (or scene from a movie) had I seen it on a less reputable site.
Amazing. And it does look like the Fortress of Solitude…
I thought these linds of crystals formed in molten rock. Was this area volcanic?
It is hot because the cavern lies above an intrusion of magma, so yeah molten, no volcanic. Yet.
Here’s the page for the Naica Project.
Wowza.
Why doesn’t all that walking on the crystals damage them? Couldn’t there be a less intrusive way to investigate the cavern?
This reminded me also of the Monolith Monsters (1957):
This other video shows how hard it is to get images from the cave under those hot conditions:
There are a couple of hour-long documentaries that sometimes turn up on (IIRC) the National Geographic Channel.
Any damage caused by people tromping all over them pales in comparison by the damage caused just by being exposed.
Along with Cisco, I had the same initial reaction when I sat the magazine photos. It is amazing what nature can provide to entertain and delight us.
I’d be wary of walking around in there. I wonder how much danger there is of one of those crystals breaking and crushing someone.
In some pictures I see people touching the crystals with bare hands. I took an off-trail tour at Carlsbad Caverns once, and touching the various mineral formations was a big no-no. They told us that the dirt or oil from our fingers could stop a formation from growing for 100 years, or something crazy like that. Maybe that doesn’t matter since they drained the water and the crystals aren’t growing anymore.