Monthly Archive for July, 2010

A delightful little interview with the author of “Blind Descent: The Quest to Discover the Deepest Place on Earth”. Even though I do not get the sense that Talbor, the author, is himself an explorer of caves, there is a bit or two for the imagination to alight upon for a moment.

Most people think caves are dead holes, but they are alive in many ways. For one, they breathe. There are pressure changes at the surface, and as the pressure increases it forces air down into the cave, so it’s inhaling, as it were. When the surface pressure decreases, that cave starts to exhale. They have clocked the exhalations at Lechugilla cave in New Mexico at over sixty miles per hour. So they can really roar.

If you should like to take further subterranean gambols, perhaps with a sober and captivating dash of political economy, The Road to Wiggan Pier may hold some interest:

When you have finally got there—and getting there is a task in itself: I will explain that in a moment—you crawl through the last line of pit props and see opposite you a shiny black wall three or four feet high. This is the coal face. Overhead is the smooth ceiling made by the rock from which the coal has been cut; underneath is the rock again, so that the gallery you are in is only as high as the ledge of coal itself, probably not much more than a yard. The first impression of all, overmastering everything else for a while, is the frightful, deafening din from the conveyor belt which carries the coal away. You cannot see very far, because the fog of coal dust throws back the beam of your lamp, but you can see on either side of you the line of half-naked kneeling men, one to every four or five yards, driving their shovels under the fallen coal and flinging it swiftly over their left shoulders. They are feeding it on to the conveyor belt, a moving rubber, belt a couple of feet wide which runs a yard or two behind them. Down this belt a glittering river of coal races constantly. In a big mine it is carrying away several tons of coal every minute. It bears it off to some place in the main roads where it is shot into tubs holding half a ton, and thence dragged to the cages and hoisted to the outer air.