The Crow Cave, or Kruber Cave, is considered the deepest in the world. Maybe this is not the case, but none of the caves studied to date can compare with it in depth. Its lowest point is at 2,196 meters. It is likely that it is even deeper, but so far it has been possible to study it so far.
The Raven Cave is located in the Arabica mountain range in the Gagra range in Abkhazia. There is a whole network of underground voids in this area. The cave branches into two main branches: Nekuibyshevskaya and The main one. The depth of the first one, 1300 meters, is also impressive, but the record holder is the Main One with its studied 2,196 meters.
At the very entrance
The cave is of karst origin and belongs to the subvertical type. It has several vertical wells, the deepest of which are 115, 110 and 152 meters. There are 8 siphons in the lower part of the main branch, at depths from 1400 to 2144 meters. They are filled with water and you can only go there with scuba gear.
The site is accessible to tourists
There is another record associated with the cave. Its groundwater is fed by the shortest river in the world, the Reprois. Its length is only 18 meters and it flows into the Black Sea. The record-breaking river originates deep underground, and the water in it is incredibly cold even in the summer heat. The entire cave is located in the limestone column, and below 1600 meters this sedimentary rock has a black color.
The conquest of the “underground Everest”
The cave was discovered relatively recently, in 1960. This was done by Georgian speleologists, who were then able to descend only to a depth of 90 meters. At that time, no one suspected that the Raven Cave was a record holder, which would later be called the “underground Everest” for its depth. The discoverers named it after the father of Russian karst studies, A. A. Kruber.
In 1968, the Kruber Cave was visited by an expedition from Krasnoyarsk, which named it Siberian. After that, they forgot about it for many years and began to study it again only in the mid-80s. Ukrainian speleologists managed to descend to a depth of 340 meters. It was they who gave the cave its most famous, “folk” name — Crow.
The Abkhaz-Georgian war of 1992-1993 blocked scientists’ access to this underground system. The next expedition, again Ukrainian, arrived at the cave only in 1999. This time, the researchers stopped at a depth of 700 meters. But a year later, the guys returned and improved the record twice, to 1,410 meters. In 2001, the joint Ukrainian-Russian team reached 1,710 meters. Speleologists would have advanced further, but they ran into an impassable blockage.
But in August 2003, a private Cavex team found a detour and, overcoming a siphon with water, descended another branch to 1,680 meters. The guys reported that the passage was free further, but they did not have enough resources to continue exploring the cave. They returned in 2004 and reached a depth of 1,775 meters.
This is not the limit
But the record did not last long. In the same year 2004, an expedition from Ukraine stopped at 1,840 meters, and a couple of months later reported reaching 2,080 meters. The Lithuanian team from the Aenigma speleology club descended 2,140 meters into the Raven Cave in 2010. There was a record holder in the team of 4 people — athlete Saule Pankene became the first woman in the world at such a depth.
Photos from the underground camp. Gennady Samokhin is far right
The deepest point of the Voronya-Kruber cave was 2,196 meters. Gennady Samokhin, a Ukrainian speleologist from Simferopol, was able to descend so deeply. He claims that the voids go even deeper, but at 2200 meters the path is blocked by another siphon.
Descent into Crows are an incredibly dangerous, difficult and expensive occupation. The Ukrainian expedition, which set a record, delivered 150 liters of gasoline for primuses, 500 kilograms of food, and 3,000 batteries to a huge depth. Speleologists have deployed 7 camps; the deepest of which, “Rebus”, set a world record at a depth of 1960 meters. In terms of time, the descent to 2,196 meters took a whole month.
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