Black history below-ground

Mammoth Cave, the longest known cave system in the world, gets about 600,000 visitors a year, 400,000 of whom are led through the caverns by a succession of men whose history dates back more than a century. Known as "Uncle Mat," Materson Bransford (IMAGE ABOVE TAKEN IN 1875) – an emancipated slave whose owner had sold 3 of his children – carried a walking stick, lantern, fuel can, and a picnic basket containing lunch for his tour group. Sometimes, the guides would write the names of the tourists on the ceiling to earn extra money. Other times, the guides would scratch their own names into a wall to show where they had been. Jerry Bransford (IMAGE HERE) is Mat's great-great-grandson, which makes the 67-year-old African-American the 5th generation of his family to work as a tour guide in the world-famous Kentucky cave. “Whenever I see a signature from my kin, I feel awed by what they did. But when I see Mat’s, it just knocks me down."

Posted with Blogsy

A cave so enormous...

 

 

...it has a jungle inside! National Geographic's Mark Jenkins describes:

"An enormous shaft of sunlight plunges into the cave like a waterfall. The hole in the ceiling through which the light cascades is unbelievably large, at least 300' across. The light, penetrating deep into the cave, reveals for the first time the mind-blowing proportions of Hang Son Doong. The passage is perhaps 300' wide, the ceiling nearly 800' tall: room enough for an entire New York City block of 40-story buildings. There are actually wispy clouds up near the ceiling."

Hang Sơn Đoòng ["Mountain River cave"] was found in 1991 by local Vietnamese man Ho Khanh. Located in Phong Nha-Kẻ Bàng National Park on Vietnam's border with Laos - a 6-hour hike from the nearest road - the cavern (photos here, videos here) is the largest in the world (pictured above, note size scale of explorer in 3rd image). It was surveyed in 2009 (interactive graphic here) and contains not only a forest of 30m-tall trees, but an underground river, a 61m wall of calcite, cave pearls, stalagmites more than 70m tall, gigantic skylights in the limestone ceiling, and a chamber 5km long, 200m high, and 150m wide.

The cave remained so well-hidden that even Khanh forgot where he had found it 20 years earlier as a young boy. Adam Spillane of the British Cave Research Association explains, "The terrain in that area of Vietnam is very difficult. The cave is very far out of the way. It's totally covered in jungle, and you can't see anything on Google Earth. You've got to be very close to the cave to find it. Certainly, on previous expeditions, people have passed within a few hundred meters of the entrance without finding it."

Official website: http://www.sondoongcave.org/
Coordinates: 17°27'25.88"N 106°17'15.36"E

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Some previous posts about caves:

Caves

Cheddar man

Coal mining and caving

Cave paintings at Lascaux

Hermits - 2 scenarios

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Stone Age studio

Capturing cave art

A little googling revealed that the photographer who captured the 1st circulated images of the prehistoric art in Lascaux is still kicking - but not like he was in 1947 (2rd image) while framing the horses and steers (1st image) on the walls and ceilings of the French cave. American photojournalist Ralph Morse is now in his mid-90s and has retired to South Florida. At the time, Morse had been working for Life magazine for 5 years. He had covered World War II (Guadalcanal, the invasion of Normandy, the war trials at Nuremburg) and went on to photograph events as diverse as the space program, the World Series, heart transplants, and the funeral of Albert Einstein (see his work here and here), winning numerous awards. Morse recently reminisced about - and shared some unpublished photographs from that initial shoot in Lascaux (slideshow here). "The first sight of those paintings was simply unbelievable. I was amazed at how the colors held up after thousands and thousands of years - like they were just painted the day before! Most people don't realize how huge some of the paintings are. There are pictures of animals there that are ten, fifteen feet long, and more," remembers Morse. It was a difficult assignment, both because it was hard to get the necessary equipment after the war and because it was not easily accessible. "It was a challenging project -- getting the generator, running wires down into the cave, lowering all the camera equipment down on ropes. But once the lights were turned on ... wow!" And the paintings were not just striking, they were highly accurate.

Stone Age studio

An interesting find has been made in South Africa's Blombos Cave (1st image). A team of researchers from the universities of Bergen and Witwatersrand, led by Professor Christopher Henshilwood (2nd image, pictured in 2002), discovered artefacts that indicate the cave was used by an artisan 100,000 years ago as a studio. The Archaeology News Network brings the scene to life:

"It was a beautiful spot, a workshop with a glorious natural picture window, cooled by a sea breeze in summer, warmed by a small fire in winter. The sandy cliff top above was covered with a white-flowering shrub that one distant day would be known as blombos and give this place the name Blombos Cave. The man picked up a piece of reddish brown stone about 3" long that he - or she, no one knows - had polished. With a stone point, he etched a geometric design in the flat surface-simple crosshatchings framed by 2 parallel lines with a 3rd line down the middle. Today the stone offers no clue to its original purpose. It could have been a religious object, an ornament or just an ancient doodle. But to see it is to immediately recognize it as something only a person could have made. Carving the stone was a very human thing to do. The scratchings on this piece of red ocher mudstone are the oldest known example of an intricate design made by a human being."

The items found:

• ochre slabs
• abalone shells containing the residue of red ochre
• bone tools for incising lines
• charcoal from fires used to heat the materials
• quartzite grindstones used to mix the pigments
• hammerstones
• shells that were deliberately perforated and decorated with ochre to wear as beads

The pigments may have been used to paint bodies in addition to objects and walls.

Cave pearls

Did you know - I certainly didn't - that pearls can form in caves much like they form in the shell of an oyster? They are the result of calcite forming around a nucleus, such as a grain of sand, in a limestone cave. If water current or drips rotate the nucleus in such a way that it is coated evenly, a cave pearl up to 15cm in diameter forms. It then sinks in the pool and is buffed to a high gloss by the motion of the water. This motion keeps it from adhering to the cave floor, but the pearls may adhere to each other in a form that looks like a bunch of grapes. In the passage below from the National Geographic website, American Mark Jenkins narrates the exploration of an enormous uncharted passage in the massive Hang Son Doong [“mountain river cave”] on the border between Vietnam and Laos with British team members Gareth “Sweeny” Sewell and Howard Clarke:

"It’s just the three of us now, exploring. No human has ever been here before. We drop down off the backside of the Great Wall and begin ascending a staircase of rock toward the exit. 'Will ye look at deese!' roars Clarky, kneeling beside a dried-up pool. Sweeny and I gather around. Inside the pool, illuminated by our headlamps, are cave pearls. Cave pearls are formed when a drop of water from the ceiling hits the limestone floor and throws up a speck of rock. This grain is jostled in its little cup of stone every time a drop hits it. Over thousands of years, a solid, almost perfectly round calcite pearl is formed. Pearls are rare and in most caves are no larger than a marble. The cave pearls here are the size of baseballs, larger than any the cavers have ever seen. (Their preternatural size may be due to the enormous distance the ceiling waterdrops fall.) 'I ’ereby christen this passage Pearl ’arbor,' Clarky announces."

Cave pearls in Vietnam's Hang Son Doong (1st image), California's Crystal Cave (2nd image), and New Mexico's Carlsbad Caverns (3rd image).

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I've done a post about size scale and the Crystal Caves before, but above are 3 reasons to return to the subject.

Boulder, 50' high (2nd image)
When the Eyjafjallajokull volcano in Iceland erupted earlier this year, this giant rock - estimated to weigh 1,000 tons - was released when a glacier was melted by the heat. The meltwater flood swept it down the mountainside and onto the valley floor. This is one of more than 10,000 images of the volcanic event taken over several weeks by Icelandic photographer Ragnar Sigurdsson, who describes, "Personally my favourite picture is an aerial shot of the crater taken while flying at low altitude in high wind speeds and the door of the plane taken off so I didn't have to shoot through glass. I could feel the heat of the volcano against my face as we made our pass."

Driftwood, 200' long (3rd image)
This giant western red cedar was one of dozens of trees washed up on the beach of La Push, Washington, U.S.A. Photographer Philip Lacham is dwarfed by its 13' diameter as he stands next to it. Park officials said a combination of a strong gale and high tide carried the trees from Olympic National Park in the state's northwest corner.

Crystals, 55 tons (1st image)
In this photo, scientists are wearing special cooling suits to explore a series of deadly hot Mexican caves lined with enormous crystal formations up to 35' long. The caverns formed 1,000' beneath the Chihuahuan Desert in temperatures of 118° Fahrenheit and 90% humidity. The gypsum crystals formed in scorching water heated by underground magma chambers. That water has been pumped out since 2000, when the mining company that owns the land discovered the Cave of Crystals, but will soon be allowed to flood the caverns again. Scientific teams have had opportunities in 2008 and 2009 to explore. Ontario astrophysicist Sara Poirier observed, "When you're in the caves, you're overwhelmed by the [harsh] conditions, but you're also overwhelmed by the beauty, and it's really hard to maintain your focus." "It's funny, because when you look at the pictures of us in there in the suits, it looks like we're in an ice chamber, but it's just the reverse," added Penelope Boston, of the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology.

Genyornis

It had a beak like a parrot, which distinguished it from the emu and has led some to believe it was a carnivore. It had stubby wings and was flightless, but would have been able to run fast on its sturdy legs. It stood over 2M tall and weighed upwards of 500lbs. It was the Genyornis (1st image), an extinct bird endemic to Australia. Fossils of the bird have been found in association with human artifacts, indicating that it co-existed with people for 15,000 years before it died out more than 40,000 years ago, probably due to human activity. But now scientists have recognized it as the bird depicted on the left in what could be Australia's oldest painting - Aboriginal art made with red ochre on the wall of a cave (3rd image). "The details on this painting indicate that it was done by someone who knew the animal very well," says archaeologist Robert Gunn (2nd image). The specifics in the image could not have simply been passed down through oral storytelling. "Either the painting is 40,000 years old, or the Genyornis lived much longer than we thought." The painting was found with others - including a thylacine - on an Aboriginal reserve in the Northern Territory. The age of the image hinges on the identification of the genyornis species, which in turn hinges upon the style and artistic license of the Aboriginal artist(s). Gunn's colleague Bert Roberts says it is about whether they were "the Picassos of their age or the Rembrandts."

Follow-ups

Vivisection 1/22/10 British scientists are blowing up live pigs to study the effects of bombs. A man in Oaklan Park, Florida, performs a "coffee-table operation" on a dog he was watching and kills it. Here is a video (caution) of a seriously twisted experiment by Russian scientists.

Gatorland! 1/21/10 Scientists have determined that a shared breathing mechanism indicates that alligators and birds shared a common ancestor.

Kite-fighting 1/19/10 Friend Franck Cordes notes that there is a chapter on kite-fighting in The American Boys Handybook of Camp-lore and Woodcraft by Daniel Carter Beard (orig. 1882).

Gulp! 1/16/10 Moments after I published this post about the swallowing disorder pica, I was contacted by follower Lisa Wood, a gifted artist who collaged a series of plates based on the case histories of the swallowed objects in the very collection I mentioned. And her friend is writing a book on the same subject, due out later this year!

Disaster intensity scales 1/13/10 Here are some aerial photos of the earthquake damage in Haiti from National Geographic. As horrible as the tragedy and its aftermath is, unburied corpses do not pose much of a health risk. Scientists have identified a number of seismic zones throughout the world that are past due for an earthquake.

Mirror miscellany 1/17/10 Reader Kent Schnake points out the often overlooked observation that as long as a mirror is well-polished, we don't see it - we see what is reflected!

Sinkholes 1/12/10 Rubislaw Quarry in Aberdeen, Scotland - the largest man-made hole in Europe - has been sold.

Views from space 1/11/10 There are disputes over the ownership of a large meteorite that fell in Australia. Another meteorite fell through the roof of a doctor's office in Lorton, Virginia. Meanwhile, the Great Wall of China has been recreated in chocolate (although I don't usually link to weird chocolate).

Good cove, bad cove 1/6/10 Dolphins have taken up hydroplaning to catch the fish closest to shore. A French researchers suggests that heroic acts by animals like dolphins are more common than thought. Here is a story from this summer of a beluga whale carrying a struggling diver to the surface in China.

Snakes to the rescue 1/4/10 Federal officials have banned 9 species of constrictors from being imported into the U.S.

Parade floats 1/2/10 The plane that Capt. Sullenberger safely crash-landed in the Hudson River is for sale.

Bushmeat 12/27/09 A curious young chimp in the Congo investigates the remote video camera. The heart-wrenching tale of a humanized chimp named Jerry. A chimp is at the center of a custody battle in Sarasota, Florida.

Nipple shields 12/20/09 There is a strange time capsule in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada - a 1950s-era drugstore - and look what's on the shelf toward the end of the video!

Circus animals on the lam 11/13/09 Spanish photographer Jose Luis Rodriguez has been stripped of his title of photographer of the year because it was discovered that the wolf in his award-winning photo had been rented from a wildlife park. The hippo who escaped from the zoo in Montenegro has returned to her enclosure.

Humpback whales 11/10/09 Close encounters with beluga whales in the Arctic circle.

Odd animals 11/4/09 This strange creature that turned up in Texas has been identified as a hairless raccoon.

Engineering feats 11/1/09 A schematic drawing of the British warship H.M.S. Temeraire, built in 1793.

One man band 10/24/09 Here is a deft performance by a member of the Brooklyn-based chamber music ensemble Project Trio.

Lizard lore 10/17/09 Villagers in Indonesia are supplying Asian demand for geckos to be used in traditional medicines.

Dinosaur eggs 10/3/09 American paleontologists have announced that prehistoric velociraptors also spit venom at their prey. Australian scientists blame humans for the demise of the megafauna that lived 400,000 years ago.

Animal clarity 8/16/09 The unusual shell of the scaly-foot snail, discovered in 2003, may assist in the design of armor for soldiers and vehicles, say American researchers. Similarly, the silence of owls in flight (pictured) have inspired aircraft technology.

Jaws in 1916 8/8/09 A harrowing account of an Englishman being eaten by a shark while on holiday in Cape Town, South Africa.

Creative cremains 7/24/09 The far-flung posthumous travels of American adventurer Ralph White. Ongoing repairs at a crematorium in Coventry, U.K., are marring Sikh death rituals.

Bride and groom 6/1/09 A British teacher sacrificed himself and drowned to save his bride on their honeymoom in Egypt.

Cave paintings at Lascaux 5/27/09 Plans are afoot in Italy to breed the aurochs depicted in cave paintings back from extinction.

The art of David Teniers the Younger 5/22/09 Japanese macaques huddling together for warmth.

Chihuahuas in the weird news 5/2/09 What's a follow-up without a chihuahua story? This one was found by security staff at the Dublin airport being smuggled in a Bulgarian man's suitcase.

Emmett Kelly 4/25/09 An example and explanation of the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon, a form of synchronicity.

Bears in the news 4/24/09 The den of a black bear hibernating in Minnesota is being monitored by a remote camera that just captured the birth of her 3 cubs!

Giants 4/17/09 A German model stands 6' 9" tall.

Centenarians 3/26/09 Here is a fantastic video of people aged 1 through 100.

Spider prey 3/7/09 Video of a giant centipede eating a bat. And watch this toad's defense when it is about to be eaten by a tarantula!

Megafishes 2/15/09 A blind British woman landed a 214lb catfish in Spain, after which she released it back into the river.

Disturbing decapitations 1/23/09 A human head and a red flower were found at the tomb of a Mexican drug lord.

Caves 1/15/09 A BBC video of the Crystal Cave of Giants in Chihuahua, Mexico.

More mammoths 1/6/09 DNA analysis of frozen soil by an international team of scientists shows that woolly mammoths existed for thousands of years longer than previously thought.

Dr. Seuss 12/25/08 A disagreement in Minnesota parallels the plot of Dr. Seuss's story The Zax.

Blizzard of 1888 12/14/08 Many wondrous photographs of ice caves around the world. A long-predicted form of stable ice has been confirmed in the lab by British scientists. Scientists have assessed that the ice in the artic Beaufort Sea is "rotten." Pioneering 19th c. images of snowflakes by American photographer Wilson A. Bentley have gone on sale. Photos and an explanation of hair ice. And a live audio feed from under the ice in Antarctica.

Conjoined twins 11/29/08 The world's oldest conjoined twins, Ronnie and Donnie Galyon of Ohio, are moving in with their brother rather than into an assisted-living facility.

Albinos 11/18/08 "White Bambi" spotted in the Italian Alps.

Oldest zoo in the world 11/10/08 A neighborhood association has stopped the Oakland Zoo from its practice of cutting down non-native trees and feeding the crunchy snacks to elephants and other animals. An Asian elephant has been born for the 1st time at the Melbourne Zoo. A Norwegian man who is trying to collect 1 million giraffes to win a bet is nearly halfway there.

Animal extinction 11/9/08 The eel population in London's River Thames have dropped precipitously (98%).

Follow-ups

Aquaria 11/23/09 Valencia, Spain, boasts not the largest tank, but the largest aquarium in Europe, the Oceanografic.

Stone/house 11/19/09 Reader Angelica Compton brought my attention to this article about an enormous boulder in a house in Margaretville, New York.

Follow-ups 11/16/09 The photograph in this post shows a Chinese man who has had half his body amputated. The operation is called a hemicorporectomy and here is more about why and how often it is performed.

Alligator urban legends 11/14/09 Here is a dead alligator photographed last week near Manaquiri, Brazil. And here is a crocodile photographed in Tanzania on top of the backs of some hippos who then attacked and killed it. Two men in Bangladesh were sentenced in absentia to 2 years in jail for beating and blinding a sacred crocodile at a shrine. You may still vote for your favorite entry in the Viewer's Choice Competition of National Geographic's International Photography Contest 2009, including #23, a striking close-up of an occupant of Kwena Crocodile Farm in South Africa. Lastly, fossils uncovered in the Sahara Desert reveal "a world full of crocodiles."

Placentas and more 11/12/09 A female photographer with phocomelia gave birth to an average-sized son, now 4 years old.

Forensic pathologists 11/8/09 In this post I featured some famous forensic pathologists. I was recently asked to write an editorial for Anil Aggrawal's Internet Journal of Forensic Medicine and Toxicology and discussed - in an article called "No 'Glass Ceiling'" - the increasing presence of women in the field.

Odd animals 11/4/09 Like Gemina at the Santa Barbara Zoo, a young giraffe named Amali has arrived at the Tulsa Zoo with a crooked neck.

One man band 10/24/09 It dawned on me to look up the history of another street musician - the organ grinder - and find out why they are always depicted with monkeys. They operated organs of various sizes on the street and were often looked down on: banned, accused of petty theft, and considered tone deaf. The monkeys were used to attract attention, performing tricks and collecting coins from patrons. The photo above shows an Afghan boy (obviously not an organ grinder!) with his pet monkey.

Winks and blinks 10/21/09 You have probably heard about Rom Houben, the Belgian man who was unable to communicate for 23 years until doctors recently discovered that he was not in a persistent vegetative state. Because he now types very quickly on a touch-screen keyboard with a finger cradled by a therapist, there are those who doubt the story.

Burqa 10/20/09 Barbie in a burqa is going on sale at a charity auction. While we're on the subject of things Muslim, here are 2 incredible photographs: Afghan children reading the Koran and pilgrims in Mecca before the start of this year's haj.

Dinosaur eggs 10/4/09 A rich accumulation of dinosaur bones has been found at the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument site in Utah.

Gossamer 9/27/09 A deadly Australian spider has invaded Japan, possibly in woodchips aboard a container ship.

Pig butchering 9/1/09 Two rats, 2 pigeons, a rooster, a rat, and some 20,000 buffalo have been slaughtered in Nepal in the world's biggest animal sacrifice.

Squid 7/17/09 The strange mating secrets of the squid are revealed in 2 articles, one from 2005 and the other from 2008. Here is an award-winning photo of a squid embryo.

Green eggs and ham 5/11/09 Two firetrucks carrying 15 firefighters responded to the smell of gas in Axedale, Australia, only to find it was due to the flatulence of a 120kg pig. In Ridgetown, Ontario, Canada, a small pig left in the washroom of a Tim Horton's donut shop has been reunited with its owner - a student at the local agriculture school. And here is an article about the intelligence of the pig.

Coal mining and caving 5/4/09 Like Floyd Collins, John Jones has died while exploring a cave despite aggressive attempts at rescue. Here's a piercing photo of some Ukrainian miners.

Dolly the sheep 5/2/09 The world's oldest sheep, 23-year-old Lucky, has died in Lake Bolac, Australia.

Chihuahuas in the weird news 5/2/09 A chihuahua name Shyla in Christchurch, New Zealand, has become a surrogate mother to 7 abandoned kittens.

Mastectomy tattoos 4/27/09 There is research afoot in Australia to enable women to regrow their breasts after mastectomy.

Raiding ancient Egypt 4/20/09 Twenty of the mummies in the Egyptian National Museum of Antiquities in Cairo have undergone CT-scanning that revealed signs of atherosclerosis.

Giants 4/17/09 A female American model over 6' 8" tall is being featured in an Australian men's magazine next to an average-sized model.

Octopus fossils 3/19/09 Here is a lovely photomicrograph of fossilized red sponge coral.

Kangaroo home invasion 3/15/09 A man in Melbourne, Australia, was attacked and the dog he was walking nearly drowned by a kangaroo they startled in the park. Meanwhile, a remote community in Australia's Northern Territory are being terrorized by 6,000 wild camels.

Octopi at it again! 3/8/09 My Dad and I learned on a documentary the other night that octopi live in every ocean, so I became curious what an Arctic octupus (scroll to the end of the link) and an Antarctic octopus look like. The rare "dumbo" octopus recently turned up in the Census of Marine Life.

Chilblains 2/27/09 The Guiness Book of World Records has recognized a 76-year-old Nepalese man as the oldest person to summit Mount Everest.

Double-muscled dog 1/30/09 This dalmation has no excuse for its size except its owner, who has been banned from owning dogs for 10 years.

Disturbing decapitations 1/23/09 Like the people on the Canadian bus, the riders of New York's D train were trapped on board with a homicidal maniac armed with a knife.

Ancient animals 2/19/09 A first edition of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species is being auctioned after it was found in the guest washroom of a private home in Oxford, England. The gender of a tortoise estimated to be 75-100 years old has been mistaken for 50 years.

More mammoths 1/6/09 Researchers have found a fungus in mammoth poop that is explaining why they died out.

Auroras 12/23/08 To complement this image of the world with an aurora, here is a film of the planet showing the movement of the clouds.

Election Day! 11/4/08 In re: people-watching in the past - here is a mesmerizing film taken in San Francisco in 1905 to compare to 1901 footage from Washington, D.C., linked in this post.

Elephants 10/30/08 There is a link in this post to photos of animal embryos. Here is a photo of a 14-day-old transgenic mouse.

Cave paintings at Lascaux

John Carey's Eyewitness to History is still in print. I was fascinated by it years ago when I read the firsthand accounts of important events that it contains. It does not include the discovery of the cave paintings in Lascaux, France, but I have found a pretty good account:

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On September 8, 1940, Marcel went on a treasure hunt. For years, people had talked about a secret underground passage in the countryside around their French village. They said that the passage led to hidden treasure. The French teenager thought he had found the passage when he discovered the opening to a long vertical shaft. Four days later, on September 12, Marcel and three of his friends returned to explore it. This time, Marcel brought an oil lamp to light the way. One after another, the boys wriggled down the long passageway. Finally, they tumbled into a huge cavern, and Marcel held up the lamp. By its flickering light, they noticed a high passage. The friends entered the passage, and Marcel shone the light on its walls. What the French teenagers saw amazed them. Herds of horses, oxen, and deer stampeded across the curving cave wall. The colorful animals seemed to leap off the walls. Excitedly, the teenagers ran through the cave and found room after room of paintings. They had found the real treasure of Lascaux.

The cave paintings discovered by the teenagers - Marcel Ravidat, Jacques Marsal, Georges Agnel, and Simon Coencas - are estimated to be 16,000 years old. Lascaux is unique for the exceptionally realistic portrayal of the animals and for the large size of some of the paintings: one of the aurochs in the Cave of the Bulls is 17' wide - the biggest animal image ever found in a Stone Age cave. The public was allowed access from after World War II to 1963, by which time the 2,000 paintings had suffered from the carbon dioxide of 1,200 visitors a day. A nearby replica of two of the galleries was opened in 1983 and The Cave of Lascaux website is beautiful, but now the cave is beset by fungus and black mold. Since January 2008, not even scientists are allowed access.

Coal mining and caving

Coal mining is one of the most dangerous occupations in the U.S., but fatalities have decreased over the decades - with the exception of 2006, when an explosion in the Sago Mine in West Virginia trapped 13 miners and killed all but one of them. This is a fraction of the American coal miners killed in December 1907, which author Carlton Jackson calls "The Dreadful Month": the lives of more than 700 men were lost in mining disasters in West Virginia (361 in a single morning), Pennsylvania (273 in explosions at 2 mines), Alabama, and New Mexico. The most dangerous mines, however, are in China: about 6,300 people were killed in 2004 in floods, explosions and fires in China's 34,000 mines. China also has the dubious distinction as the location of the world's worst mining disaster, when 1,549 workers were killed in a single explosion in 1942.

Although the bodies of the victims of the Sago Mine explosion were all recovered, victims of other mining disasters have been entombed in the shafts. Such was almost the fate of Floyd Collins - twice over. Collins was not a coal miner, but a cave explorer. Determined to find a connection between Crystal Cave - which his family owned - and Kentucky's Mammoth Cave, he became trapped in a narrow passageway 55' underground, and only 150' from the entrance to the cave, on January 25, 1925. He had been caving alone when a dislodged rock pinned his leg, but he was missed and found by friends the next day. Though they could not remove the rock either, they lowered food and an electrified bulb (for light and warmth) to him. Massive rescue operations ensued and when the tunnel leading to Collins collapsed twice, a vertical shaft was excavated to reach him. With crowds drawn to the site, rescuers reached the caver on February 17th - but found him dead of starvation and exposure. It was deemed too dangerous to remove his body, so Collins was left in place until his brother recovered the remains on April 23rd by excavating from the other direction. Collins was buried on family property, but when the homestead and cave were sold in 1927, the new owner installed him in a glass-topped casket and displayed him in Crystal Cave. The cave was closed after it was purchased in 1961 by Mammoth Cave National Park, but it was not until 1989 that the Collins family succeeded in getting the National Park Service to remove and reinter the body. The incredible tale of Floyd Collins is told in Trapped. He also had a well-deserved place in my Modern Mummies book, as you can see from the photograph below.

Cheddar man

Britain’s oldest complete human skeleton - dating to approximately 7150 B.C. - was excavated in 1903. The remains of an adult male who had died a violent death (and may have been cannibalized) were found in a cave in Cheddar Gorge, Somerset. Living just a half mile from the site, schoolteacher Adrian Targett asked his class to participate in a study commissioned as part of a television documentary. Samples of mitochondrial DNA from the cheek cells of his 15 pupils at the Kings of Wessex school, from Targett himself, and from 5 adults from old Cheddar families were compared to mitochondrial DNA extracted from Cheddar Man's tooth. The longest human lineage ever traced - 9,000 years - belonged to none other than Mr. Targett! "I am overwhelmed, a bit surprised," he said at the time. Caveman jokes have been circulating at the school ever since. ''I'm thinking of writing to the Marquess of Bath, who owns these caves, and saying, 'I'd like my cave back.' ...All those times I'd visited this cave before, and I'd never realized I was going home.''

Caves

Check out the size scale in these two photographs, which I do not believe are Photoshopped. On top is the Crystal Cave of Giants in Chihuahua, Mexico, which contains some of the largest natural crystals ever found: translucent gypsum beams measuring up to 36' long and weighing up to 55 tons (note the man on the left). Below that is Cueva del Fantasma in Aprada tepui, Venezuela, which looks like an average-sized cave until you note the two helicopters at the entrance...

Lechuiguilla Cave in Carlsbad Caverns National Park is the 5th longest known cave in the world (122 miles so far) and the deepest limestone cave in the U.S. It is off limits to the public, but you can take a virtual tour via a slideshow or video.

I assumed all caves were off limits to me, but my friend Sheila pointed out that Carlsbad Caverns is accessible (at least in part). And my stepmother Sarah found that Shenandoah Caverns near Luray, Virginia, has an elevator, so Penelope (BeBe's predecessor) and I got to go underground a couple of summers ago!