Krubera crow cave. The deepest caves on earth. Jewel Cave. South Dakota, USA
The Krubera-Voronya cave, which is located in Abkhazia, is the deepest in the world. It is located in the area of the Arabica mountain range, its depth is 2190 meters. The deepest karst cave is a series of numerous wells connected by galleries and stiles.
This "abyss" has an entrance, which is located above two thousand meters above sea level. From a depth of about 1000 meters, the central branch branches, going further into the depths with its numerous "tentacles".
The Krubera-Voronya Cave holds more than one world record. Her The groundwater give life to short river on the planet - Reprua, which has a length of only 18 meters. She, after her short takeoff, flows into the Black Sea.
The deepest cave in the world is the Krubera-Voronya cave.
An interesting fact related to bottomless cave”, is that an animal from a number of springtails lives here, which existed 450 million years ago. Scientists discovered it at a depth of 1980 meters and this underground dweller gave the name Plutomurus ortobalaganensis. I would like to note that no one lives deeper than this creature in the world.
The cave was first discovered and explored by speleologists from Georgia in 1960. They studied it to a depth of 95 meters. Then the cave got its first name in honor of A.A. Kruber, who was the father of Russian karst studies. Many expeditions plunged deeper and deeper underground, reaching new levels. Courage these people do not hold. Their courage was rewarded with more and more interesting discoveries.
Krubera-Voronya cave in Abkhazia.
The second part of the name - Voronya, the cave received in the mid-80s of the twentieth century. This is how Kyiv speleologists named it, who explored the cave to a depth of 340 meters. To date, the record for diving in Krubera-Voronya belongs to a speleologist from Ukraine, Gennady Samokhin. He managed to descend to a depth of 2191 meters in 2007.
USA expedition to the Krubera-Voronya cave, August 2004. Video.
Depth (meters): 2199
Stroke length (meters): 16058
Origin: Karst
The deepest explored cave in the world. Located in the Arabica massif in the Gagra Range in Abkhazia, Georgia. Depth 2199 m, length of passages 16058 m.
Entrance altitude: 2250 m above sea level Number of inputs: 5 Studying where the water is moving sometimes leads us to the most unexpected consequences. If a speleologist of the 60s were told that the caves could be deeper than 2 km and it would be possible to go down and up into them in just a couple of days, he would not only not believe it, he would laugh in your face. But the 21st century brought us not only the Internet, but also the two-kilometer Krubera-Voronya cave, the deepest abyss on planet Earth.
How to get there
The Krubera-Voronya cave is located in the Orto-Balagan valley, in the zone of alpine meadows. The transfer takes place from the Abkhazian village of Tsandripsh, a 15-minute drive from the Russia-Abkhazia border, where they get from Adler or Sochi. As a rule, this is a trip on a reliable and passable car GAZ-66, "shishige" - the roads to Orto-Balagan are repaired only by the forces of the drivers themselves and it is better not to look at them for the faint of heart. 5-6 hours of shaking on huge stones and the car is unloaded at the summerhouse of a faithful friend of Arabica speleologists, the shepherd Avanes - he lives here with his family from May to the end of September and knows all the experienced speleologists by name. A little to Voronya more than an hour walking uphill on a winding path.
Description
The entrance is modest - a small funnel in mugs, a hinge from the entrance. Expeditions to the cave are made regularly several times a year, so the weight is stationary, it is monitored, but due to high traffic, sometimes its quality may not always be at its best. The cave is purely vertical - a series of wells and ledges is interrupted by transitions and then continues. At a depth of 200 meters, the so-called Main Branch (-2196 meters) and the Nekuybyshevskaya Branch (-1700 meters) separate. There are several permanent underground camps in the cave - at a depth of -1200 meters, -1640 meters and a number of others. Up to -1400 meters can be reached by land without a wetsuit, this is if there is no flood. After - you need to put on a hydra. Next, you need to overcome the siphon by holding your breath. There are eight siphons in Krubera, but the rest are not so harmless. Donny (-2145 m) is called “Two Captains” - the Crimean cave diver Gennady Samokhin, who, as part of the expedition of the Ukrainian Speleological Association, dived 50.5 meters on August 10, 2013, deepening the cave to 2196 meters. Since 1999, the cave has been regularly explored by two teams - UCA under the leadership of Yuri Kasyan as part of the Call of the Abyss project and CAVEX, Moscow. However, the composition of their expeditions is almost always international - speleologists from more than 10 countries of the world work in Krubera, including Ukraine, Russia, Lithuania, Israel, Iran, the USA, England, etc. Relations between the two competing teams are complex and ambiguous, giving rise to a lot of legends among the speleomir of the former CIS. 
In 2014, speleologists from the expedition of Andrey Shuvalov (CS MGU) discovered the Arbaik entrance, the funnel of which is 3 meters higher up the slope from Kruber, which made Voronya a cave system with two entrances. In the same year, Gennady Samokhin (USA) dived the Amber Siphon, but found that it connected with the well-known land part of the cave not far from the Big Fork (-1790 meters). The USA also began to study the "historical" bottom of Kruber at -340 meters, where a continuation is guessed behind the impenetrable narrowness. In 2015, members of the MSU-Cavex CS expedition led by A. Shuvalov finally connected Kruber with the Kuibyshevskaya cave - a long-awaited event in the speleo world. The passage was predicted even before the start of the expedition, by comparing the topographic survey of the Svetlanka Gallery of the MGU CS club (-350 meters) and the topographic survey of the Kuibyshevskaya cave of the Samara speleological section of the SSAU. Andrey Shuvalov: “From the end of our survey to end point Samara ascent of benchmark 40 remained approximately 180 meters in plan and 85 meters vertically. The pioneers managed to descend next to the Samara ascent, finding themselves at river 40. In 2015, the UCA expedition led by Yuri Kasyan, consisting of 15 people, was the last to work in the cave. Their work proceeded mainly in the Nekuibyshevskaya branch. Gennady Samokhin: “4 people worked underground for 2 weeks. They lived in the Creme Brulee camp at a depth of more than 2000 meters, they were assisted by a group located in the camp at 1250 meters. The work was carried out in the Nekuibyshevskaya branch (-1700 meters) in three ascending windows, but they were not crowned with particular success ... There was only one idea left - there is a sand pipe about 50 meters long vertically from the camp, where in 2014 they tried to work with sledgehammers . It ends with an inflection big amount sand, behind which there is a narrowing. Behind it you can see the move and hear the echo, but the air at the bend is very stagnant (at such depths there is no draft at all) and for 2 hours of work you already start to suffocate there ... But the work was carried out - you could already see 4-5 meters of the passage ahead and then the hall with leaks but unfortunately not with us little man and there was not enough effort to expand - they could only stick out into the passage up to the chest. Another object of study in 2015 was the far part of the USA Gallery - 1.5 hours walk from the camp -1200 meters. According to superimposed topographical surveys, it practically coincides with the bottom hall of the Kuibyshevskaya cave vertically, and in terms of it, 100 meters are missing. In the face of the UCA Gallery, there is good air draft and a lot of run-in pebbles of various calibers, it deepens in this blockage by 2 meters. According to Samokhin, this fact can serve as evidence that during catastrophic floods of the distant past, an ascending siphon worked here, pulling pebbles. This is typical only for this place, there is nowhere else like it. As conceived by the researchers, they will strive to bypass the bottom blockage in the Kuibyshevskaya village and reach the next big water. In addition to work in the Krubera cave itself, other potential entrances to the Orto-Balagan hydrosystem are being actively developed - the Martel and Berchilska caves. 
The Krubera Cave is the dream of almost every caver in Russia and the CIS, but technically it is far from simple. First of all, it is necessary to master the SRT technique perfectly, and not be afraid of large wells. In addition, as a rule, they go to work there for 7-20 hours and, accordingly, you need to carry a lot of cargo with you, which means that the norm here is that one speleologist has at least 2-3 transport bags weighing 10-14 kg. From -1300 meters, the set of obstacles is complicated by the watercourse, that is, a wetsuit is required. The temperature in the cave is +3-+6 degrees, the deeper it gets, the temperature rises. Last years due to the impossibility of helicopter transfers in the winter months, work in the cave is carried out in the summer in July-August. You can visit Krubera-Voronya only by becoming a member of one of the regular expeditions, fully accepting its conditions. Research History
Studying the karst of the Arabica mountain range (Abkhazia River) in 1960, Georgian speleologists discovered for the first time an inconspicuous future "Mecca from speleology", went through it to a depth of just under 100 m and named it after the Russian karst expert Alexander Kruber. In the 80s, a surge of speleoactivity gave impetus to a new round of Arabica research - then the cave acquired the second name Siberian, and then the third - Voronya. But it has not yet become the deepest - it reached a depth of -340 m, but "did not go further". The Abkhazian military conflict of the 90s for a long time closed access to Arabica cavers for a long time and the next expedition took place only in 1999. However, speleologists of Ukraine were not going to set records at that time - they planned to go deeper and find a higher entrance to the Arabikskaya cave system, which includes the Kuibyshevskaya, Genrihova Abyss and Detskaya caves. Krubera, on the other hand, seemed to them simply as top entry into this system, which became a reality only in 2015. However, their work on the first ascent in the well P59 served as the beginning of a new era in speleology - the era of caves, the depth of which exceeds 2 km. The Ukrainians managed to step from -340 m to -750 m, but the discoveries did not end there.The Internet is a funny thing. At the same time, it brings great benefits modern man, it also carries a lot of rubbish and not everyone can cope with the flow of information that pours into the network. The Internet is very relaxing and contributes to the fact that the majority stop thinking, frivolously trusting everything that they meet on the pages of the network. However, I am not going to talk about the usefulness and harmfulness of the Internet here.
From the Editor:
Krubera-Voronya is the deepest cave in the world (depth 2196 m), located in the Arabica mountain range in Abkhazia. The entrance to the cave is located at an altitude of about 2250 m above sea level in the tract Orto-Balagan
The cave, which is part of the Arabica mountain range, was discovered in 1960 by Georgian speleologists and explored to a depth of 95 meters. Expeditions conducted in the cavity of the karst cave over the next half century found small forks at a depth.Knowledge about the mysterious underground passages multiplied with each new descent: for several decades, each regular speleological expedition announced that they had reached a new depth. Research is still ongoing, they are carried out by: Ukrainian Speleological Association (UCA) under the leadership of Gennady Samokhin and the Russian Association of Cave Explorers, Cavex Club
For several years, this pack of photographs appears on various sites and is very rapidly distributed by social networks, often by people who have never been to this cave (it is clear that those who were there would not distribute it, but there are billions of times fewer of them :) ).
To be honest, I myself have not been there everywhere, but many of the photos do not at all correspond to the specifics of the cave. Therefore, I had a desire to understand all the photographs. I must say that it was quite difficult.
I spent two evenings on 10 photos and realized that Google itself already believed that all this was Krubera-Voronya :) - about 500 links for each photo and everyone says that this is the deepest cave and invite them on an excursion and all sorts of oddities. After all, it's easier than ever to touch the secrets of the Universe without getting up from the couch. (The funniest text that appeared with these photographs was a suggestion to imagine a height of 6 eiffel towers, and then, relaxing and looking at the pictures below, imagine how you descend from such a height :) into such beauty).
And so, I proceed to the destruction of photomyths about the cave of Krubera-Voronya.
The first photos I identified are the work of National Geographic photographer Stephen L. Alvarez. In fact, Stephen Alvarez was in Krubera Voronya and participated in the USA Call of the Abyss expedition as a National Geographic photographer. Apparently, the little man who first began to distribute the false photo knew about Alvarez's trip to Krubera-Voronya and “got” photos from him, not realizing that he was also in many other caves :) located far beyond the borders of Abkhazia.
Ellison's Cave, Northwest Georgia, USA (Ellison's Cave, Northwest Georgia, USA), photo by Stephen L. Alvarez.
Ellison's Cave - 12th among the deepest caves in the US and has the deepest vertical well free fall(without ledges) in the continental United States, which is called the Fantastic Pit (Fantastic Pit), 178.6 m deep - it is also shown in the photo.
The depth of Ellison's Cave is 324m, the length is 19.31km. The cave and its surrounding area are supervised by the Department Natural resources Georgia and is open to the public all year round. Due to the technically complex and dangerous nature of the cave, only the most experienced and capable speleologists are involved in its exploration. General information about the cave is in Wikipedia.
Short video presentation by Stephen Alvarez:
Kabal Cave, Actun Kabal is one of the four caves of the Chiquibul Cave System, which are located along the Chiquibul River, Cayo, Belize, Central America. In addition to the village of Cabal, the Chikvibul Cave System includes the village of Actun Tun Kul (Tunkul) and the village of Cebada (Cebada Cave), located on the territory of Belize, as well as Xibalda, which is located on the territory of Guatemala.
Cabal is the upper part of the Chikvibul Cave System, stretching for this moment 12 km and an amplitude of 95m. The cave houses one of the world's largest halls, the Chiquibul Chamber, measuring 250m by 150m.
Another one from largest halls Cave system - Belize Chamber (Belize Chamber) with dimensions of 300x150m and a height of 65m is located in the village of Aktun Tunkul. The cave is also of archaeological value - Mayan pottery was found in it, which had lain in the dark for about 2000 years.
Mystery Falls Cave located in the area of Hamilton, Tennessee, USA (Hamilton County, Tennessee, USA). The length of the cave is 416.7 m, the amplitude is 100.6 m. The depth of the well is 83m.
Cave Conley Hole (Conley Hole (the author of the photo has it recorded as Conoly Hole) located near the town of Viola (Viola, Tennessee, USA). Conley Hole is a bottle type well with a depth of 50m. The diameter of the entrance well is about 6m. The base of the bottle is about 240m in diameter. In 1973, the cave was marked by NNL (National Natural Landmarks) as one of the brightest examples bottle wells in the USA. Permission from the local landowner is required to visit the cave.
Hytop Drop Cave, Franklin County, Tennessee, USA. Located in the Walls of Jericho (also called the Grand Canyon of the South) near the Alabama border. The depth of the cave is 52m, the length is 637m. In the photo there is an entrance 30m well.
(author's note. In Krubera-Voronya in a T-shirt, you won’t even dare to go down into the entrance well :))
Cave of the Swallows (ESA ALA, Sótano de las Golondrinas) is in Mexican state St. Louis Potesi. The depth of the cave is from 333 to 376 meters. The fact is that the entrance to the cave is on a slope and the bottom in the cave itself is also inclined. Also in the cave there are many narrow passages, more deep levels. However, these passages have not yet been fully explored.
Access to the cave is limited local authorities from 12:00 to 16:00, so as not to disturb the birds inhabiting the cave (at this time, they fly in a flock to hunt).
Part of the filming of James Cameron's famous film "Sanctum" took place in the Cave of the Swallows.
And this is a photo of Kruber-Voronya, which was taken by Stephen Alvarez during the USA expedition "Call of the Abyss" in 2004 , only they, for some reason, are not found in the lists of photographs that are lured on excursions to the Deepest Cave of the World.
Some of these photos can be found on the website of the author - Stephen Alvarez. All other pictures with their names and descriptions are on a special National Geographic website - right on the main page, enter the name of the cave of interest (in English) or the name Alvarez into the search engine and enjoy the work of this photographer (these pictures can even be bought right there on the site.
I will continue the destruction of photomyths. Another American cave, but by another author
Piercy's Cave, West Virginia, USA (West Virginia, USA)
Piercy's Cave, West Virginia, USA (West Virginia, USA). Horizontal cave with a length of 1867m and an amplitude of 23m. Photo by Dave Bunnel is a photographer and former NSS News Editor.
By this name, Google gives out another cave - Piercy's Mill Cave - these are different caves.
For this cave no detailed information I did not find it, except for its characteristics, which are on the well-known site caverbob, where almost all statistical data on world and American caves are presented.
All photos are taken in Miao Keng Cave, which is located close to mountain village Tian Xing, Wulong, Chongqing, China. Miao Keng, along with five other caves, make up a cave system (whose name I did not find). The depth of the system is 1020m, the length is 35.5km.
The photos were taken by Manchester-based photographer Robbie Sean, who spent 2 months on the expedition with the researchers. In the first and third pictures, the well of the Miao Keng cave is one of the deepest wells in the world (491m). Thanks to him, the cave is also called the Great Chinese Mine (China's big shaft).
The descent into this well took the researchers two hours. On the second picture - underground river at the bottom of Miao Keng.
Photographer Robert Sean website. Many of his photos are on Instagram.
And the place of this shooting should be familiar to many lovers of Karabi (Crimea)
The author of the photo is Che3000, a user of the LiveJournal, where he posted a report on the trip to Karabi. Moreover, the report contains the phrase: "Do not confuse with the deepest cave in the world, the Krubera-Voronya cave, which is located in Abkhazia." Apparently, not everyone is interested in reading other people's reports. By the way, in some photo tales about Krubera-Voronya, I met a few more photos from this report. The photos are very beautiful and high quality. The only pity is that it is important for people to climb on some beautiful leak for the sake of a couple of photographs that look very beautiful even without little men. And in the report there is a photo of the brand of the cave, but in order to understand it, you need to be a speleologist :).
From general information about Krubera, Karabi, Crimea - a vertical mine, 62m deep. The length of the cave is 280m. Named in honor of A.A. Kruber - an outstanding Soviet physical geographer, the founder of Russian and Soviet karst studies.
All the photographs are impressively beautiful, just like the phrase "The deepest cave in the world" itself is impressive. But this does not mean that all beautiful photos caves should be called the deepest cave in the world of Kruber-Voronya. After all, they are all unique in their own way - each has its own Name, its own history, its own characteristics. We do not name all Ukrainians, for example, actresses Angelina Jolie, or all the cars that drive on hometown, - Ferrari.
Or all speleologists - YuKasy :). I believe that we, cavers, should convey this to those who do not know this. Of course, the UCA will not print brochures with these photos and offer its members of the Association to distribute them on the streets, as all sorts of aunts-gods do :). I wrote this article so that in the event that someone once again posts information about the Deepest Cave and once again gives out a pack of these pictures, or offers an excursion there with promises to see all these beauties, you can refer to it (article).
And after this article, there will also be an article with real photos from Kruber-Voronya, which we will promote.
Editor's note: And this real photo caves of Krubera-Voronya, made during last year's expeditions of the USA "Call of the Abyss"
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There are several fairly deep caves, and over 85% of those discovered to date are above sea level!
But not these ten: they are the deepest in the world, and some of them are so deep that they can only be explored and studied with the help of radar equipment, since not a single person could survive in them ...
10 Huautla Cave System, Mexico
depth - 1475 m
It is a cave system that is said to have endless passages, waterfalls as high as a 60-story skyscraper, and real natural wonders such as a huge 90-meter cavity called "Aphrodite Hall" (Anthrodite Hall).
9. Czech Cave II (Čehi 2), Slovenia
depth - 1502 m
In Slovenia, all caves are considered national property and protected by law, even if they happen to be located on privately owned land!
8. Sima De La Cornisa Cave, Spain
depth - 1507 m
This cave system is famous for its 28 Neanderthal skeletons found in one of the deepest parts of the cave. But how did they get there without the equipment we have today is still one of the greatest secrets peace.
7. Cave them. Vyacheslav Pantyukhin (Pantyukhinskaya cave), Abkhazia
depth - 1508 m
In the mine. Vyacheslav Pantyukhin, there are 513 caves, and every year more and more new ones are opened.
6. Cave of Torca del Cerro (Torca Del Cerro Del Cuevón), Spain
depth - 1589 m
The cave system of Torca del Cerro is a system consisting of two interconnected deep crevices. In addition, it is a deep chasm that has taken the lives of many cave explorers.
5. Jean Bernard Caves, France
depth - 1602 m
This cave is located in the Alps and has the highest entrance in the world. It's also pretty deep, but that goes without saying since it's on this list.
4. Mirolda Cave (Gouffre Mirolda), France
depth - 1626 m
Back in 2001, the Mirold Cave was considered the deepest in the world, but over time, deeper cave systems were discovered, which you will learn about below.
3. Lamprechtsofen Cave, Austria
depth - 1632 m
This is a cave that has been known and explored since 1701, but shortly after its discovery, it was walled up to prevent the intrusion of treasure seekers who tried to get into it, having heard the legends about the wealth hidden by a knight named Lamprecht, who returned from the Crusades.
2. Snow Cave, Abkhazia
depth - 1753 m
Snezhnaya Cave is a generic name cave system, which consists of interconnected caves: "Snezhnaya", "Mezhenny", "Illusion".
1. Krubera Cave, Abkhazia
depth - 2199 m
Also called the Crow Cave, it is the deepest cave in the world today, and every time someone descends into it using sonar, it gets deeper and deeper. The Krubera-Voronya Cave is the only one of the known caves, the depth of which exceeds 2 kilometers.
Already passed more than 2.000 meters down.
Speleologists first learned about the existence of the Krubera-Voronya cave in the Arabika mountain range in Abkhazia in 1960. Then they managed to descend only 95 meters. The cave was classified as shallow and forgotten about for 8 years. During the second attempt to explore the cave, speleologists reached a depth of 210 meters, the third expedition reached 340 meters.
From that moment on, each subsequent expedition set itself the main goal of descending as low as possible. However, with each new descent, only the number of discovered passages and branches grew, while the exact depth of the cave continued to remain a mystery. In 2001, another team of cave explorers reached a record depth of 1710 meters, which made it possible to officially classify the Krubera-Voronya cave as the deepest cave on the planet.
mountain range Arabica, in which the cave is located, is located 15 kilometers northeast of the Gagra resort.
Krubera-Crow is karst cave subvertical type. It consists of a series of wells connected by passages and galleries.
The first entrance to the cave is located at an altitude of about 2250 m above sea level in the Orto-Balagan tract. The second entrance to the cave, which was discovered in August 2014, is located 3 meters higher than the first.
At a depth of 200 meters, the cave branches into two main branches: Nekuibyshevskaya (in 2010, the depth is 1697 m) and the Main branch (the current depth is up to 2196 m). Starting from a depth of 1300 meters, the main branch branches into many other branches.
More than 8 siphons are known in the bottom part (located at depths from 1400 to 2144 m). The cave is located in a limestone layer, while the bottom part from a depth of 1600 meters is laid in black limestone.
Until June 2001, the deepest cave in the world was the Lamprechtsofen cave, 1632 meters deep, located in the Northern Limestone Alps, until the expedition of the Ukrainian Speleological Association with the participation of Moscow speleologists set a world record, reaching a mark of 1710 meters in the Krubera-Voronya cave.
The mark of 1710 meters for the cave was not the limit. During subsequent expeditions, speleologists announced that they had reached a new depth.
In 2004, the Krubera-Voronya cave became the only famous cave in the world with a depth of more than 2000 meters. On October 19, for the first time in the history of speleology, they overcame a 2-kilometer barrier - 2080 m.
You can get into the cave only as part of one of the speleological expeditions, and even then only if you have the appropriate climbing skills and special speleological equipment.
In 2005, within the framework of the regular UCA expedition, hydraulic leveling was carried out to clarify the depth of the cave. A series of subsequent expeditions by the rival Cavex and UCA teams were engaged in diving the bottom siphons, increasing the depth of the cave several times.
At the moment, the cave has been explored to a depth of 2197 meters. The current record belongs to speleologist Gennady Samokhin.
There are still unexplored branches in the Krubera-Voronya cave. Whether they will lead to new records or to a dead end is still unknown.
Exploration of the cave continues to this day.
