James M. Tabor - 002 Blind Descent - Prologue | Текст песни

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• James M. Tabor
• 002 Blind Descent - Prologue

PROLOGUE

As the fifteenth century began, we believed, absolutely, that the earth was flat.

As the twenty-first century began, we believed with equal certainty that every one of the earth’s great discoveries had been made. Almost a century had passed since Peary first trod the North Pole and Amundsen the South. Hillary and Norgay summited Mount Everest in 1953, Piccard and Walsh dove the deepest ocean in 1960. Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the moon in 1969. We played golf and drove a dune buggy there not long after. Surely that tolled discovery’s death knell.

But flat-earthers were wrong, and so were those who had prematurely mourned the death of discovery. When the third millennium rolled around, one last great terrestrial discovery did still await: the deepest cave on earth. The supercave.

Extreme cave exploration is just as exciting, difficult, and deadly as any pioneering feat in mountains, oceans, polar regions, or even off-planet. When he learned about supercaves, Buzz Aldrin said, “I’d thought there could be no environment as hostile as the lunar surface. No more.” Thus Aldrin would not be surprised, nor should anyone be, that we stood on top of the world in 1953, but the year 2000 came and went without our having found the bottom of it.

Alien, bizarre, and deadly they most certainly are, but supercaves are not only about adventure. Bill Stone, one of the two great supercave explorers featured in this book, bristled when an interviewer for NationalGeographic.com asked how he would describe his brand of “adventure.”

“Let’s first dispense with the adventure label,” Stone shot back, adding that “modern, high-tech exploration, which is what I do, is quite different. The objective is to advance our knowledge of the frontiers by bringing back new data.” Science, in other words, and, indeed, caves are scientific cornucopias as well, furthering research in areas as diverse as pandemic prevention, how the earth was formed, extraterrestrial life’s origins, new petroleum reserves, and Mars missions.

And yet, the search for the deepest cave on earth is the greatest epic of discovery and adventure you’ve never heard of. Despite its drama, danger, and valuable contributions to science, extreme cave exploration remains largely unheralded. In part this is because we prefer our heroes clean and beautiful. Think of our grandest exploration icon, Neil Armstrong: immaculate and pure, his knightly suit burning white against the gray moon and black space. Caving, on the other hand, is by its very nature dirty, dark, and wet.

But there is something else. We’ve had photographs of mountaineers since the nineteenth century and moving pictures of them almost as long. Good underwater footage from the 1940s exists. And we watched Neil Armstrong actually take his great first step. But for most of its long history, cave exploration remained out of our collective sight and mind. Only quite recently have sophisticated batteries and digital recording technology made it possible to take cameras far down into supercaves, which are thousands of feet deep and many miles long. So while their mountaineering, aquanaut, and astronaut counterparts basked in the limelight, extreme expeditionary cave explorers labored in the dark both beneath the earth’s surface and above it.

In fact, the subterranean world remains the greatest geographic unknown on this planet—called “the eighth continent” by some. Mountains, ocean depths, the moon, and even Martian scapes can be—and have been—revealed and explored by humans or our robotic surrogates. Not so caves. They are the sole remaining realm that can be experienced only firsthand, by direct human presence.

By the turn of the twenty-first century, three crucial things had become clear about the last great terrestrial discovery. First, it probably would be made within a decade. Second, it would almost certainly be made in one of two places: the Abkhazia region of the Republic of Georgia or the state of Oaxaca, in southern Mexico. Finally, one of two

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