Son Doong Cave

The World is again held spellbound by one the world’s greatest discoveries. a gigantic cave discovered amidst the jungles of the Vietnam. The British exploration team from British Cave Research Association expedition claims this to be the largest cave passage of the world discovered so far.

The Hang Son Doong of Vietnam commonly called as the “mammoth cavern” has a jungle inside it .The cave is so big that a skyscraper could fit into it and still the expedition team has not been able to discover the end of the passage. The cave measures is about 80mts (262mts) wide thought most of the passage, at some places it is even 140 mts (460 ft) wide. The previously record holding largest cave of Malaysia ,The Deer cave, is 300 ft has a 300 feet wide passage but it’s about a mile long whereas the former is  astonishingly 2.8 mile long with still the end away from human sight. The British team claims that they have been able to gauge only 2.8 miles through their expedition and they were jammed later by the seasonal floodwater’s of the river that flow through it.

The explores have used high tech & dead accurate laser techniques for the measurement of the cave. This discovery in field of caving has definitely boosted their confidence and their remark that the satellite images show some other great discoveries are still awaiting in the great Amazon jungles is a proof of this.

History to the discovery

The Hang Son Doong lies in the most difficult terrains of Vietnam and so it is very difficult to reach out there. The cave is covered by jungles and one has to be very close to the cave to find it. The cave is very eerie and noisy-the expediting team fears of the poisonous centipedes that lie inside. They even claim to have seen monkeys coming inside and moving out through the top of the cave. There are also a couple of skylights about 300 mts above. The river flowing inside the deserted produces ghastly noises that can be heard at the entrance.

The discovery of the cave is marked back in 1991 by a local Vietnamese farmer called Ho Knanh.It is also believed that the local farmers of the area were barware of the discovery but they were too scared to excavate inside. It was this local farmer that guided the British-Vietnamese team to the cavern.

Inside the cave

Son Doong’s airy chambers sprouts plantations where a fair amount of light enters from the top making it differ from other bare, creep and dark insides familiar with most of caves. In the jungles beneath the roof openings the explorers have seen monkeys, snakes and birds. Near the exit lies the cascade of limestone grooves depicting a large waterfall which stopped the explorers in their way.

The world’s largest cave has been tunneled by the river Rao Thuong, which gradually shrinks to a series of ponds during the dry months. The river can rise to about 300 feet during floods. There is unusually a large collection of stone spheres formed drip by drip over the centuries as calcite crystals left behind by water which fills the dried out terrace pools near the garden of Edam in Hang Son Doong. Somewhere in the cave lie the “cactus garden” which are gardens of fat and thin stalagmites looking as cactus on the floor of the cave.The the discovery has again shown the complexity that nature has always posed.

The discovery has again unfolded that nature is the biggest mystery that lies in the path.