Hranicka Propast, a cave in the Czech Republic, was recently adjudged to be the world’s deepest underwater cave. This cave reaches a tantalizing height of 1325 feet. Now that the depth has been measured, it has turned out to be 12 meters deeper than what is now the second deepest cave in the world which is Pizza del Merro in Italy.
Krzysztof Starnawski, a Polish diver first explored the cave back in 1999. He was amazed at the kind of incredible limestone formations he found there. He immediately formed the onion that the cube may extend a whole lot deeper than what most people have been to.
This is why he started a Czech-polish expedition and it was supported in part by National Geographic grant. More and more data were collected over a period of two years as numerous dives were recorded.
It was very recently that a remotely operated underwater vehicle was used to measure the limestone abyss and accurate information was extracted which led to this cave being adjudged as the world’s deepest.
The records over the years
It was in 2014 that Starnawski reached as deep as 656 feet and he believed that this was the deepest part of the cave. However, he soon found a narrow opening which helped him find another vertical tunnel. Thus, he realized that the depth is even more than what he had estimated. As he is a deep cave diver, he was surely curious to check the deepest parts of the cave and find out the details.
When he returned back to the cave last year, he found that the narrow passage had widened considerably and he could manage to squeeze in inside it. This helped him measure the depth more accurately. It was on September 27th, 2016 that the cave’s actual depth was finally measured. The ROV technology was used to measure the depth because humans cannot reach such a depth.
The cave was found to be quite large and there were plenty of fallen branches and debris. It is believed that the cave went through a lot of changes and it even seems to follow a natural rock feature too. Although the depth has been measured, the team has plans for further exploring the cave because who knows it might just have another opening in it left to be explored.
Source: here
