I was born in the area where Movile Cave is located but I never knew about its existence. I think they managed to protect it because it was discovered during communism, when all the companies were state-owned, and one silly blunder could ruin your entire life.
Greek cities were established on the Black Sea coast in ancient times, and the area looks similar to some of the land in Greece: sandy and slightly arid. Further back inland are the ruins of very old mountains. As a teenager, I crawled through some claustrophobic cave systems in there, bumping into bats and other critters.
The mountains in Greece started forming 160 million years ago (until 25 million years ago). The Carpathian mountains started forming 65 million years ago, with the ones in Poland, Ukraine, and Romania forming 20-11 million years ago).
But the mountains in the vicinity of Movile Cave formed 300-400 million years ago. Although they were 3000 m high, erosion has reduced them to 500 m dwarfs or smaller. The area is in fact a plateau, whose underground basements date back 600 million to 1.6 billion years.
I’m aware of the importance of the ecosystem inside Movile Cave, but my opinion is that research here has focused mainly on geology. I imagine there were teams of geologists accompanied by one biologist.
Oxygen levels at Earth’s surface are about 21%. The air inside the cave contains oxygen levels of around 7-10%. The researchers must have wondered about the oxygen within the cave too. The geology of rocks suggests that tiny amounts of oxygen could seep in through tiny pores or fractures. Groundwater pathways could bring some oxygen too. And the water itself contains bits of oxygen, besides the high amounts of hydrogen sulfide and methane.
The animals inside the cave have adapted to the low levels of oxygen, but they definitely need it. Even the bacteria that use hydrogen sulfide and methane as energy sources wouldn’t survive without it because the chemical reactions involved in their metabolism consume oxygen.
Can you imagine being a centipede or whatever, going about your day, and suddenly there’s some seismic shift that permanently seals you in total darkness, and you’re like, “Well, this is how my descendants shall live, I guess.”
Or the subterranean critters have heard of a distant realm, accessible only to the chosen ones when they’re still in their infant (or pre-infant) stage if they manage to find the secret underwater passage. This is the promised land, where the abstinent form the elite and abundance is accessible in moderation.
It’s not so different from all the animals that lived in Antarctica when the last land bridge to South America became wide enough to act as a barrier. It became a very big isolated island. Little did they know that some millions of years later the whole island continent would freeze over and that all their descendants would die.
But first they lived just fine, as if nothing had happened except that their migratory routes were cut off.
Sounds a lot like us and AGW. We’re mostly dimly aware something is changing, but can’t really fathom what it is, or what its real consequences will be.
Difference is, unlike the animals, we supposedly have brains and can work out what’s really going on and the consequences and alter course accordingly. We (collective we) just choose not to pay attention to it.
If you want a really interesting lifeform with a specialized environment, there’s a fungus that lives inside the reactor chamber at Chernobyl, and which photosynthesizes from gamma rays.
The Dodgers swept the Brewers last year in the NLCS. When the Brewers returned the favor by sweeping the Dodgers this year, it marked the first time in baseball history that teams swapped sweeps in a 7 game series.
The Planck Length, which is the smallest measurable unit of length in physics, is so small that, if a proton was the size of our entire solar system, the Planck Length would be the size of a virus.
Addendum: Amazingly, I discovered this browsing Facebook reels last night.
Google tells me that the youngest active NFL players for the 2026 season are rookie linebacker Arvell Reese of the New York Giants and rookie center Connor Lew of the Cincinnati Bengals, both born on August 30, 2005 (age 21).
In the Czech Republic it’s legal to possess a ‘small amount’ of cannabis for personal use. But the term ‘small amount’ is not defined in law and is totally at the discretion of the Police Officer who has caught you with it. Offering to share your stash with them usually helps though.
Imagine a Planck Volume, a cube 1 Plank Length on each side. Imagine then that you find a way to fit a single numerical digit (0-9) within that volume. Then imagine that you fill all of the Planck Volumes in the observable universe with digits.
The number you’ve written isn’t large enough to equal the number of digits in Graham’s Number.
Graham’s number is the upper bound of a particular math problem. In the original 1971 paper, the lower bound was 6, but they’ve managed to tighten it up a bit, and now the lower bound is apparently 13.
