“Supercave” discovery

t’s called a “supercave,” hidden beneath the ground and reachable only by an underground stream is the immense Miao Room cavern in China.
Reported by an international mapping team using a new laser tracking system, this cavern in the Gehibe Cave complex is said to be the biggest in the world.

Image by: NatGeo

 The single chamber was measured at 380 million cubic feet. To give you an idea of how big that is, you could fit four copies of the Great Pyramid of Giza inside or 22 football fields, and still have plenty of space left over.
"To me this is like discovering that K2 is larger than Everest," Tim Allen, an expedition co-leader who studied the Chinese cave, told National Geographic.
The measurements were this week at the Hidden Earth 2014 national caving conference, held in England.

The ‘supercave’ is located in the Ziyun Getu He Chuandong National Park near Guiyang, China over 100 metres underground and contains And it also contains stalagmites as tall as 45 metres, which are among the world’s biggest.
The caves have not been fully explored, however, with the 3D laser-mapping technique being used to work out what most of it looks like.

Plunge pools on the approach to Sarawak Chamber. Photo: Tour Malaysia

 

This discovery makes Miao Room 10 per cent larger than the previous title holder, Sarawak Chamber beneath the jungles of Borneo in Malaysia.
Some will argue that Miao Room is not actually the largest cavern as it is not as deep as Krubera Cave in the Republic of Georgia which plunges more than 2.4 kilometres below the surface and it is not as long as Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave which has more than 640 kilometres of passages but volume of this “supercave” speaks for itself.

Krubera Cave. Photo: Gafa Kassim/Flickr

 There are many caverns that vie for “supercave” status, including Mexico’s Sac Actun which ranks among the longest underwater caves in the world, one of a huge network of water-filled passageways below the earth of Tulum and caving aficionados will continue to explore and map them. As long as they can find a way in.