Speleology

There are thousands of caves in the Philippines, with around 400 caves documented and explored so far. The limestone karst landscape of the country provides ideal conditions for cave formation and exploration.

Because limestone uplands with appropriate internal geology and surface drainage in areas of long-term, suitable climatic conditions are so widespread. Not all limestone areas support caves though.

They do not - apart from a few less-developed areas of the world where extracting speleothems for sale to unsuspecting tourists or unscrupulous dealers is seen as commercially acceptable by the locals trying to live in very poor areas. Caves do not contain economic minerals.

In a few areas, such as the Peak District in the English Midlands, and the Mendip Hills (SW England) 18-19C lead-miners broke into caves by chance, and they did search for lead-ore (galena) there but rarely if ever found useful amounts.

They did however sometimes rob caves of their stalactites to sell to wealthy people to decorate their trendy artificial garden grottoes. One of the worst offenders was the poet Alexander Pope, who hired local marksmen to shoot down stalactites in Wookey Hole for his grotto: God knows how many were simply smashed to useless gravel in the process.

Removing natural objects from caves except for genuine scientific research or to save them from destruction by quarrying, is rightly regarded as wanton vandalism; and is highly illegal in many places.

It can be exciting, awe-inspiring, fascinating, scientifically rewarding..... it all depends on the individual's tastes, interests and abilities, and on the chosen caves.

Although the term "exploration" is often used rather loosely, I have had the pleasure and privelege of original discovery and exploration, and each of those trips is a unique and unrepeatable experience because you are seeing, negotiating and admiring something on Earth that literally no-one else has ever previously seen.

Early people used caves for shelter, protection from the elements, and as a place to store their belongings. Caves also served as sacred spaces for religious or spiritual practices and as locations for creating art and symbols on the cave walls. Additionally, caves were used for burials and as a temporary refuge from predators.

Lake Arrius Caverns is located in the game Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. It is situated near Lake Arrius in the province of Skyrim.

The Ajanta Caves were created by Buddhist monks, starting from the 2nd century BCE and continuing for about 700 years. They were carved out of rock to serve as places of worship, meditation, and religious retreat. The caves are renowned for their exquisite architecture and ancient paintings that depict various events in the life of Buddha.

It's more accurate to ask what types of rock hold caves, given that a cave is a lack of rock, as i think that's what you mean!

Most caves form in limestone, so the floor, walls and roof are of limestone, as are most of the boulders on the floor. Rivers can also wash in cobbles of other rock, such as Millstone grit from above the Limestone in Carboniferous formations.

Lava tubes form in low-viscosity lava flows, so are in basalt or similar low-Si rock.

You can also find minor caves and rock-shelters formed in other competent rocks by fluvial or sub-aeriel weathering. E,g, sea-caves, and cavities sand-blasted into sandstone rock-faces by desert sand-storms.

Oooh, they have their own special range of "land-forms"; passage profiles, chambers, erosion features not seen in surface water-courses, stalactites and stalagmites, particular sediment deposits....

I suggest you look on-line or in text-books for photographs of caves. Those in show-cave publicity are a good start provided they are taken by genuine cave photographers who can do the cave justice, and not simply collections of visitors' snap-shots. Caving-club web-sites might hold some good photos too.

Most caves are in limestone, and their primary characteristics are passage forms that show how the cave developed; and calcite formations (stalactites, stalagmites, etc.)

Some have impressive streams in them.

There is also a range of less obvious characteristics & features such as sediments, structural-geology evidence exposed in the walls, and so on.

Probably the one thing most people think of is the darkness. It is absolute, something we never experience in our normal world on the surface; and even very experienced cavers waiting a while in one spot underground rarely turn all their lamps off for more than a few minutes unless they really have to conserve the batteries.

They never lived in caves as a complete race. Some people lived in caves as so do today - Gran Canaria for example. Atheists and scientists would like us to believe that man was a hunter/gatherer for a million if not hundred of thousands of years. This is not so. Why would a man walk miles to hunt for meat or vegetables when it would have been much easier to heard animals and breed them or plant vegetables where he lived - right outside the cave for some, lol. Is it only in the last few thousand years of existence that it has dawned on man that he can farm. I don't think so.

No, of course not. They work in coal mines.

Caves don't develop in the Coal Measures.

Some 18-19C lead-miners in places like the Peak District (English Midlands) broke into or mined from natural caves in the area's Carboniferous Limestone. They were exploiting ore-bodies that had been intercepted by later cave development.

The iron-ore deposits in the Forest of Dean (England) did form within caves, but as a general rule caves and economic metallic ores do not otherwise co-exist.

Oh, and the adjective "underground" is tautologous!

Not ever so many.

Besides it's such a loose question it can't be answered very meaningfully.

If by stuck you mean incapacitated by injury, the numbers are very low. Some rescue call-out are to aid people trapped by floods or who are simply overdue through having become lost or badly under-estimating their estimated time out.

Being literally "stuck" (wedged in a squeeze to the extent that rescue is necessary) is very rare.

You'd have to trawl through the cave rescue organisations' or national caving bodies' annual reports for the particular country you are asking about, to discover the statistics; but in the United Kingdom's largest and busiest caving area, the North-West Pennines (Yorkshire and Lancashire), the number of actual underground rescues for any reason is only around a dozen a year.

To my knowledge the UK's worst fatal caving accident was also the world's worst: Mossdale Caverns - in I think 1959 but I may be wrong about the year - when all 6 cavers in one team were overwhelmed and drowned by a violent flood. Fatalities generally are rare, and such incidents as that are, fortunately, extremely rare.

That is a much harder question for a caverto answer than you might imagine!

First though you do not need the adjective.Caverns are underground bydefinition!

Each cave is unique but they have common features that include any of passage profiles related to their development, erosion details, sediment deposits, boulder piles, speleothems (fancy word that encompasses stalactites, stalagmites and related deposits), streams, pools, waterfalls(or no water at all), wildlife, geological details.....

One thing that seems obvious is the darkness. Once away from the daylight, if you turn off your lamps,the darkness in a cave is absolute. Even experienced cavers won't normally wait underground in the dark for long before putting at least a small lamp on. It plays a strange trick on you. Hold your hand in front of your face and you think you can see it as a sort of different blackness.

I suggest you ferret around the internet for photos of caves. You can find them on tourist publicity for show-caves but try to ignore the artificial paths, steps and lights, or on caving-club web-sites, etc.

Unoka consulted the Oracle of the Hills and Caves because he was worried about his crops failing. He sought guidance and intervention from the oracle to improve his harvest and bring prosperity to his family.

The El Castillo Cave site in Spain, which is also known as the Caves of Monte Castillo, was discovered by Hermilio Alcalde del Río in 1903. It is known for its prehistoric cave art and archaeological remains dating back to the Paleolithic period.

An underground cavern is a large cave or chamber typically found beneath the Earth's surface. These formations are often created through geological processes such as erosion, dissolution of rock, or volcanic activity. Underground caverns can contain unique ecosystems and geological features.

A cave system - as simple as that. :-)

Sometimes the system is named as So-&-So Cavern, especially if part of it has been modified to form a show-cave, but the formal and most used term is still "cave".

For the morphological history of a given cave you will have to read the research papers on that individual cave. However, the basic principles are:

How Caves Form in Limestone

That is such a common question on ‘Answers’ I wrote this single reply! The technical terms are introduced by capital initials.

Most of the world’s caves are in Limestone.

Caves need three materials: a soluble rock like Limestone or Gypsum, water and Carbon-dioxide (CO2).

Their host limestone also needs to be of appropriate physical structure and raised into hills, then subjected to reasonably consistent precipitation for many tens or hundreds of thousands of years.

Limestone is a sedimentary rock of which the world’s greater proportion was laid down in warm, relatively shallow, seas. The rock was laid in horizontal layers – Beds – separated by Bedding-planes which generally reflect geologically-brief changes in the environment. The suite of beds is known as a Formation, generally named after its “type area”.

Later continental uplift (tectonic processes) raise the formation along with its underlying rocks, usually tilting and folding it to at least some extent in the process. Since most rocks are brittle they cannot take much stress, and limestone beds crack into grids of fine fractures called Joints. The uplift and folding often also causes Faulting – major breaks with the rock mass one side of the Fault Plane being raised, lowered or moved horizontally past that on the opposite side. (Note: Plane – the “Fault Line” sometimes misused as a political metaphor is that of the fault-plane cutting the land surface.)

Now we have the hills, next we need rain-water that has absorbed atmospheric CO2 to create Carbonic Acid (weak, natural soda water in fact!). It may be augmented by acids from the soil, too. This solvent permeates through all those joints, bedding-planes and faults; flowing very, very slowly under considerable pressure applied by its depth, from its sinks on the surface to its springs at the base of the formation. In doing so, it dissolves the limestone (chemical weathering), creating meshes of tiny micro-conduits that over many tens of thousands of years coalesce and capture each other to form cave passages.

Once this happens, the rate of erosion can increase – though still to perhaps only a few millimetres per thousand years under generally temperate climates.

A cave, or a series within a cave system, that still carries its formative stream is called “Active”, and is still being developed.

Surface changes such as the valley floor being lowered by erosion, or down-cutting within the cave by its stream, changes the water’s route and the original, now dried-out, stream-way is called “Fossil” or “Abandoned”. Such passages may be filled with silt left by floods as the main flow gradually abandons them; or may become richly decorated with Speleothems – calcite deposits such as stalactites and stalagmites precipitated from ground-water still oozing through the joints in the limestone above the cave. In time such passages may start to break down as there is no stream to dissolve away slabs falling from the roof as permeating ground-water attacks the rock above.

In the end, surface lowering of the landscape as a whole, breaches and destroys the cave. Nothing is permanent in Nature!

Caves in limestone are also parts of Karst Landscape. i.e. a landscape developed by the dissolution of limestone, giving surface features like Dolines, Limestone Pavement, and in the tropics, distinctive hills such as those represented in Chinese Willow-pattern images. ‘Karst’ is from the Slavic word ‘Kras’, the name for its world type-area.

@@@@@

The above is purely an introduction to a vastly more complex and subtle series of processes, of course, and you need to refer to appropriate text-books on geology and cave studies to learn them.

The scientific study of caves is Speleology – embracing geology, hydrology, biology, archaeology and other disciplines.

Simply visiting caves to enjoy them for their scenery and the physical and mental challenges they present, is called Caving, though you can’t study a cave unless you can negotiate its obstacles. The enthusiasts are simply Cavers throughout the English-speaking world – you see “spelunkers” sometimes on ‘Answers’ but it's an old slang word not found in caving literature.

Luray Caverns is located in the Shenandoah Valley region of Virginia.

North America can be ahead or behind Europe in time, depending on the time zone. For example, eastern parts of North America (e.g. New York) are typically ahead of Europe, while western parts (e.g. California) are behind.

The Frasassi Caves, also known as the Grotte di Frasassi, are a series of underground caves located in the Marche region of Italy. They are famous for their stunning stalactites, stalagmites, and underground lakes, making them a popular tourist destination for those interested in exploring underground geological formations.

The fame of a cave is specific to that cave, although a region may be famous for its caves.

An individual cave may be famous for past use, for years or even centuries of reputation, for incidents occurring in it or connected with it, for some particular feature or characteristic o its own, for being a major show-cave....

The Chauvet Cave in France is known for its well-preserved cave art, dating back over 30,000 years. It contains some of the oldest known paintings created by prehistoric humans, depicting a variety of animals and scenes from daily life. Due to its significance, the cave has been designated as a UNESCO World Heritage site.