Francesco Sauro says that there’s an entire world of knowledge to be gained from cave exploration. In his Ted Talk Deep under the Earth’s surface, discovering beauty and science Sauro discusses the caves he’s explored and some fascinating discoveries.
Sauro tells us that caves form in karstic regions, areas where water dissolves rock and creates a natural drainage system that becomes a three dimensional cave over time. In the last fifty years explorers have worked through 30,000 kilometers of cave passages, but 10,000,000 kilometers of passages are thought to exist. This is a staggering statistic, and doesn’t include glacier caves or caves inside lava flows.
In 2009 Francesco traveled to the tepui table mountains in the Orinoco and Amazon basins. The mountains are made of quartz, one of the hardest minerals, but still contain cave structures. Working from a helicopter and fighting rain and fog Sauro found the perfect spot in 2013 to enter a cave and begin exploring.
The team decided to call the quartzite cave Imawari Yeuta, ‘the house of the gods’. Special precautions were taken not to contaminate this new environment with the exploration, and every effort made to share pictures and information with the world at large and the local populace. Stalactites are formed in a quartzite cave by opals, not calcium carbonate, and silica mushrooms grow on the surface. Sauro jokes that the team was worried about finding a dinosaur egg. Rossiantonite was the major discovery from these caves, a phosphate-sulfate mineral structure.
Sauro is now involved with training astronauts from NASA, Roskosmos and JAXA. Astronauts spend a week inside a cave that is always dark and feels very alien. Tasks require the astronauts to perform experiments, act as a part of a team, or spend a week in complete isolation. The cave environment is completely foreign to most astronauts and mimics a deep space immersion.
Francesco Sauro is a great speaker and the depth and beauty of the photographs accompanying this talk are amazing. His team is concerned with exploration, and bringing new minerals to the world at large for experimentation and discovery. It’s incredible to think what the next fifty years of cave exploration might hold.