Crystal Caverns: Mammoth Caves

There are hundreds of beautiful places spread throughout the known world. There are giant trees, deep canyons, the tallest the mountains, and the biggest caves. This blog is about discovering the most beautiful, weird, coolest places that can be found the known wild. Just learning about these awsome places is nice, but because almost all of these places have built a national park around one phenomenon or another, I describe some of the various activities a tourist can do there.

This is one very old cave, in order to make something like this lots of time must pass. researchers and explorers have searched theses caves looking for answers on how old this cave could be. The main theory is that by looking at the limestone deposits spread throughout the entirety of the cave to discover when they started getting eaten away and formed into a passage. Our current understanding is that passaged for Mammoth Cave were being created 10-15 million years ago.

There are many different types of caves too, sea caves, lava caves, and glacier caves. Mammoth is known as a "solution cave", which means that water created these caves in a very special way. The caves were created when water seeped into the soil from above ground picking up carbon dioxide that is in the soil. This forms a weak acid that slowly ever so slowly eats away the stone creating a channel. This allows more cid to come through, creating a bigger channel for more acid to come in. Eventually after sufficient enough time ( 15,000,000 years) it forms a cave.

There are many types of passage within mamoth cave. When someone pictures a cav in their mind, we usually imagine it as a rocky covered cave with stlagmites and tights. It may wind a bit here or there, but it is pretty much a straight shot into the earth. This is slightly correct, but there is a lot more to the cave than that. One of the many types of passages has been labeled as a canyon passage, this is two large walls on either side of you creating a thin space for you to squeeze on past. It remind people of being in a canyon with its imposing cliffs of rock. Another type of passage is the large component passages. These are multiple passages being broken down and combined into one big open area with lots of different rock deposits own on the walls. The one Mammoth is most known for is the tube passages. These are long oval tubes of cut out rock that extend into the distance. They are area where an actual river once flowed through the caves. There are many more, but I won't bore you with all of them.

For tuorists this is a unique and exciting opportunity to explore something they have never seen before. The park leads cave tours for the guests that come to see the largest cave in the world. They are fact filled and full of past stories of historic explores. This could be a story about how the American Indiands first discovered and explored the caves with only later on their feet with a torch in their hand. Or it could be abut the first settler to come of the caves to claim them as their own. Funny enough the cave is so large with so many openings, multiple men have claimed the same cave before just due to its sheer size.

I hope everyone had a good time reading, and if you want to know more look at my other blogs about the various natural wonders in the world.