Krubera-Voronya cave in Abkhazia. The deepest cave in the world: Krubera-Voronya in Abkhazia

From time immemorial, people have been trying to unravel the secrets of nature, and then conquer them. They build airplanes and skyscrapers, dive into depths of the sea, climb to the tops of mountains and, of course, go underground and explore caves.

The deepest cave in the world

Over the years, many underground goths have been found and studied. Here is a list of the deepest caves in the world

Krubera-Voronya Cave

The most deep cave of those found is in Abkhazia. In 1960, it was discovered by Soviet speleologists. And over the next decades, scientists sank ever deeper.

Expeditions carried out in the karst cave cavity over the next half century discovered small branches at depth.

The latest record belongs to Gennady Samokhin. He found that the depth of the cave was 2196 m.

There are no established tourist routes in the Krubera-Voronya cave; You can only go down to the bottom as part of one of the speleological expeditions, which are held several times a year to explore the cave cavity.

How to get there

The Arabica mountain range is located 15 kilometers northeast of the Gagra resort. Getting to the depths of the Krubera-Voronya karst cave is possible only as part of expeditions, with special speleological equipment and appropriate mountaineering skills.

The resort town of Gagra is located 20 km from the Russian-Abkhazian border. The most convenient way to get to Gagra is from Adler through the Psou border checkpoint. IN summer time You can get from the airport or Adler bus station to Abkhazia by minibuses running several times an hour. The distance from Adler to Gagra is 33 km.

Regular buses and minibuses connect Gagra with other resorts of Abkhazia - Pitsunda, New Afonomi Sukhum.

Location

The Krubera-Voronya karst cave is located in the Arabica mountain range, in the north-west of Abkhazia.

The second deepest cave in the world is also located in Abkhazia. It was found by Russian speleologists relatively recently, in 1990. Today, scientists have reached a depth of 1830 m.

Initially, the cave looked like a small gap in the rock with a very strong draft of air. The cave was named Sarma. Sarma is a strong wind that periodically blows on Lake Baikal. Its speed is 40 - 50 m/s.

Location

The cave is located on Mount Arabica. The altitude exceeds 2000 meters. Sarma Cave is a karst cave of a subvertical type and is a string of halls and wells connected by tunnels and climbs.

Perspective

Sarma Cave is one of the deepest and most beautiful caves in the world. The explored depths represent great value for world speleology. Scientists believe that the depth of the cave in the future may exceed 2 kilometers.

The third deepest cave in the world is also located in the Caucasus. Soviet scientists first descended into it in 1971. On this moment the dungeons have been explored to a depth of 1760 meters, the total length of the passages is about 32 kilometers.

It is located in the Khypstinsky massif, in one of the spurs of the Bzyb ridge in the thickness of Cretaceous and Jurassic dolomitized limestones.

Depths of the caves included in the system

Illusion -832 m, Mezhennoye -569 m, Snezhnaya -1361 m (lowest point -15 m below the mirror of Lake Morozova). IN Great hall(depth 120-160 m from the surface) - the largest underground snowfield in the territory former USSR- a snow cone with an ice core, the height of which periodically changed in different years from 25 m (based on surveys from 1971-74) to the maximum possible height of 60 m (observations from 2002-2005). The volume of snow and firn varied from 50 to 96 thousand m3. respectively. In the bottom part there are the Throne Hall and Hall X - the largest underground halls in Abkhazia. Their dimensions: Throne room - 309 m by 109 m with a ceiling height of up to 40 m; Hall X - 250 m by 70 m with a ceiling height of up to 50 m.

Other large halls

University, Enfilade (actually three adjacent halls under the same name), halls of Hope, Victory, Dolmen, Expectation, Gremyachiy, halls Glinyany Zaval, IGAN, Penelope, Vienna, Space. All of the listed halls, except for the Bolshoi and University halls, are confined to the cave river, being, in their genesis, supra-channel collapses. Along the way from the upper reaches, the underground river receives large tributaries (flows up to 10-15 l/s during low water): Nevsky Stream, New Stream, Zayachiy, Delusion, Struika, Gremyachiy Streams (falls from the ceiling of the hall like a waterfall). In the bottom part, the cave leads to the largest tributary of the Snowy River - the New (Tatyanina) River (the flow rate is estimated to be a third of the flow rate of the main channel). However, the junction of these two rivers has not yet been discovered.

The caves are located in the Austrian Alps. Locals they knew about it since the 10th century, but real research began only at the beginning of the 20th. During this time, scientists have established that the depth of the cave is 1632 m and allows for the deepest through traverse in the world.

Where is it located?

Lamprechtsophen Cave is located on the Leoganger Steinberge mountain range in the Northern Limestone Alps.

Its main entrance is a source cave at the foot of the ridge, located at an altitude of 664 m above sea level.

In the Alpine region of Haute-Savoie, in France, there is one of the deepest caves in the world - the Mirolda Cave. This is the second deepest cave in France.

For a long time Mirolda was the deepest cave in the world; today the depth of the French grottoes is 1626 meters.

In 1990, its depth was 1221 meters, and in January 2003, after a group of speleologists passed through it, the depth increased to 1733 meters. The height difference of this cave is 1750 meters, and its length is 9 kilometers. The entrance to the cave is located at an altitude of 1880 meters above sea level.

Mirolda Cave - the deepest karst abyss globe. It forms a poorly branched system of galleries and bends different levels with small wells. Mirolda Cave is an international site for study by scientific expeditions.

Is the well really impressive? And it is located not that far away!

Krubera-Voronya- this is the deepest cave on our planet . It is located in the Arabica mountain range in Abkhazia, and its depth is over 2000 m, more precisely 2190 m.

The road to the "abyss"

The entrance to this “abyss” is located at an altitude of approximately 2250 meters above sea level. The deepest karst cave is a series of wells that are connected by galleries and climbs. Starting somewhere from a depth of 1000 meters, the main branch branches and goes further into the depths with its numerous “tentacles”. More than one world record is associated with this cave. For example, groundwater K uber-Voronya the shortest river on the planet is saturated - Reprua, only 18 meters long, after which it completes its path and flows into the Black Sea. Another interesting fact, associated with the "bottomless cave" refers to an animal that lives deeper than other animals underground. Scientists discovered this creature at a depth of 1980 meters and the newly appeared underground dweller given the name Plutomurus ortobalaganensis. This animal belongs to the order springtails, representatives of which appeared in the world approximately 420 million years ago.

The cave was first discovered and explored by Georgian speleologists to a depth of 95 meters in 1960. It was visited for the second time in 1968 by a team of Krasnoyarsk speleologists at a depth of 210 meters. After this, organized expeditions moved deeper and deeper underground, reaching new depths. Today's record belongs to a Ukrainian speleologist Gennady Samokhin, who managed to descend to a depth of 2191 meters in August 2007. As for the female part of the population, the first woman to descend to a depth of 2140 meters was Saule Pankene from Lithuania.

Yes, these people certainly don’t lack for courage and bravery. Although I think their courage will ultimately be rewarded with new and interesting discoveries, for which it is worth fighting.

P.S. The photographs shown in this post were taken Steven Alvarez. The photographer specializes in photographing caves, and his work can be seen in Time magazine Magazine and National Geographic.

The Krubera-Voronya cave, located in Abkhazia, is considered the deepest studied in the world: the entrance to it is located at an altitude of about 2256 meters above sea level in the Orto-Balagan tract. The cave, which is part of a mountain cave, was discovered in 1960 by Georgian speleologists and explored to a depth of 95 meters. Expeditions carried out in the karst cave cavity over the next half century discovered small branches at depth.

Knowledge about the mysterious underground passages multiplied with each new descent: for several decades, each successive speleological expedition announced reaching a new depth - 210, 340, 710 meters. Research continued until 2007, when a depth of 2196 meters was reached. One of the grottoes of the cave was called the “Hall of Soviet Speleologists”: the discovery of the Krubera-Voronya cave is the merit of several generations of karstologists and speleologists.

The Krubera-Voronya cave is part of the Arabica mountain range, Abakhzia // Stephen Alvarez, National Geographic Stock

There are no established tourist routes in the Krubera-Voronya cave; You can only go down to the bottom as part of one of the speleological expeditions, which are held several times a year to explore the cave cavity.

How to get there

The Arabica mountain range is located 15 kilometers northeast of the resort. Getting to the depths of the Krubera-Voronya karst cave is possible only as part of expeditions, with special speleological equipment and appropriate mountaineering skills.

The resort town of Gagra is located 20 km from the Russian-Abkhazian border. The most convenient way to get to Gagra is from Adler through the Psou border checkpoint. In summer, you can get from the airport or Adler bus station to Abkhazia by minibuses running several times an hour. The distance from Adler to Gagra is 33 km.

Depth (meters): 2199

Length of strokes (meters): 16058

Origin: Karst

The world's deepest explored cave. Located in the Arabica massif in the Gagra range in Abkhazia, Georgia. Depth 2199 m, length of passages 16058 m.

Entrance altitude: 2250 m a.s.l. ​Number of entries: 5 Studying where water moves sometimes leads us to the most unexpected consequences. If you had told a speleologist of the 60s that the caves could be deeper than 2 km and that you could go down and up in just a couple of days, he not only wouldn’t believe it, he would laugh in your face. But the 21st century brought us not only the Internet, but also the two-kilometer Krubera-Voronya cave, the deepest abyss on planet Earth.

How to get there

The Krubera-Voronya cave is located in the Orto-Balagan valley, in the area of ​​alpine meadows. The transfer takes place from the Abkhaz village of Tsandripsh, a 15-minute drive from the Russia-Abkhazia border, which is reached from Adler or Sochi. As a rule, this is a trip in a reliable and passable GAZ-66 car, “shishige” - the roads to Orto-Balagan are repaired only by the drivers themselves and it is better not to look at them for the faint of heart. 5-6 hours of shaking over huge rocks and the car is unloaded at the summer house of a faithful friend of Arabica speleologists, shepherd Avanes - he lives here with his family from May to the end of September and knows all the experienced speleologists by name. A little way to Voronya more than an hour walking uphill along a winding path.

Description

The entrance is modest - a small crater in the burdocks, a awning from the entrance. Expeditions to the cave are made regularly several times a year, so the structure is stationary and is monitored, but due to high traffic, sometimes its quality may not always be at its best. The cave is purely vertical - a series of wells and ledges are interrupted by transitions and then continue. At a depth of 200 meters, the so-called Main Branch (- 2196 meters) and the Nekuibyshevskaya Branch (- 1700 meters) are separated. There are several permanent underground camps installed in the cave - at a depth of -1200 meters, -1640 meters and a number of others. You can get to -1400 meters on dry land without a wetsuit, provided there is no flood. Afterwards, you need to put on the hydra. Next, you need to overcome the siphon while holding your breath. There are eight siphons in Krubera in total, but the rest are not so harmless. The bottom (-2145 m) is called “Two Captains” - the deepest caver in it was Crimean Gennady Samokhin, who, as part of an expedition of the Ukrainian Speleological Association, dived to 50.5 meters on August 10, 2013, thereby deepening the cave to 2196 meters. Since 1999, the cave has been regularly explored by two teams - USA under the leadership of Yuri Kasyan as part of the Call of the Abyss project and CAVEX, Moscow. However, the composition of their expeditions is almost always international - speleologists from more than 10 countries of the world work in Krubera, including Ukraine, Russia, Lithuania, Israel, Iran, the USA, England, etc. The relationship between the two competing teams is complex and ambiguous, giving rise to a lot of legends among the caving world of the former CIS.
In 2014, speleologists from the expedition of Andrei Shuvalov (KS MSU) discovered the Arbaika entrance, the funnel of which is 3 meters higher up the slope from Kruber, which made Voronya a cave system with two entrances. In the same year, Gennady Samokhin (USA) dived into the Amber Siphon, but discovered that it connects with the known land part of the cave near the Big Fork (-1790 meters). The USA also began a study of the “historical” bottom of Kruber at -340 meters, where a continuation can be discerned behind the impassable narrowness. In 2015, members of the MSU-Cavex expedition under the leadership of A. Shuvalov finally connected Kruber with the Kuibyshevskaya cave - a long-awaited event in the caving world. The passage was predicted even before the start of the expedition, by comparing the topographic survey of the Svetlankina gallery of the MSU CS club (-350 meters) and the topographic survey of the Kuibyshevskaya cave of the Samara speleosection of the SSAU. Andrey Shuvalov: “From the end of our topography to end point Samara climb benchmark 40 remained approximately 180 meters horizontally and 85 meters vertically.” The pioneers managed to descend next to the Samara ascent, ending up at river 40. The last one to work in the cave in 2015 was the USA expedition led by Yuri Kasyan, consisting of 15 people. Their work took place mainly in the Nekuibyshevskaya branch. Gennady Samokhin: “4 people worked underground for 2 weeks. They lived in the Creme Brulee camp at a depth of more than 2000 meters, they were assisted by a group located in the camp at 1250 meters. The work was carried out on the Nekuibyshevskaya branch (-1700 meters) in three ascending windows, but they were not particularly successful... There was only one idea left - 100 meters vertically from the camp there is a sand pipe about 50 meters long, where in 2014 they tried to work with sledgehammers . It ends with an inflection with big amount sand, behind which there is a narrowing. Behind it you can see the passage and hear the echo, but the air at the bend is very stagnant (at such depths there is no draft at all) and after 2 hours of work there you already begin to suffocate... But the work was carried out - ahead you could already see 4-5 meters of passage and then a hall with sagging , but unfortunately was not with us little man and it took very little effort to expand - they were only able to stick out into the passage up to their chests.” Another object of study in 2015 was the far part of the USA Gallery - a 1.5 hour walk from the camp - 1200 meters. According to superimposed topographic surveys, it practically coincides with the bottom hall of the Kuibyshevskaya cave vertically, but in plan it is missing 100 meters. In the face of the USA Gallery there is good air draft and a lot of rolled pebbles of different calibers; it goes 2 meters deep in this blockage. According to Samokhin, this fact can serve as proof that during catastrophic floods of the distant past, an ascending siphon worked here, dragging pebbles. This is typical only for this place; there is nothing like it anywhere else. As planned by the researchers, they will strive to bypass the bottom blockage in the village of Kuibyshevskaya and reach the next big water. In addition to work in the Krubera cave itself, other potential entrances to the Orto-Balagan hydraulic system are being actively developed - the Martel and Berchilska caves. Krubera Cave is the dream of almost every caver in Russia and the CIS, but technically it is far from simple. First of all, you need to be fluent in the SRT technique and not be afraid of large wells. In addition, as a rule, they go there to work at 7-20 and, accordingly, they need to carry a lot of cargo with them, which means that the norm here is that one speleologist has at least 2-3 transport bags weighing 10-14 kg. From -1300 meters the set of obstacles is complicated by the watercourse, which means a wetsuit is required. The temperature in the cave is +3-+6 degrees, the deeper it gets, the temperature rises. Last years Due to the impossibility of helicopter transportation in the winter months, work in the cave is carried out in the summer in July-August. You can visit Krubera-Voronya only by becoming a participant in one of the regular expeditions and fully accepting its conditions.

History of research

While studying the karst of the Arabica mountain range (River Abkhazia) in 1960, Georgian speleologists first discovered the inconspicuous future “Mecca of speleology”, walked it to a depth of just under 100 m and named it after the Russian karst expert Alexander Kruber. In the 80s, a surge in speleoactivity gave impetus to a new round of Arabica research - then the cave acquired a second name, Siberian, and then a third, Voronya. But it has not yet become the deepest - it reached a depth of -340 m, but “didn’t go any further.” The Abkhazian military conflict of the 90s for a long time blocked access for speleologists to Arabica and the next expedition took place only in 1999. However, speleologists of Ukraine did not intend to set records at that time - the plan was to go deeper and find a higher entrance to the Arabikskaya cave system, which includes the Kuibyshevskaya, Genrikhova Bezdna and Detskaya caves. Krubera was presented to them simply as the upper entrance to this system, which became a reality only in 2015. However, their work on the first ascent of the P59 well served as the beginning new era in speleology – eras of caves whose depth exceeds 2 km. The Ukrainians managed to step from -340 m to -750 m, but the discoveries did not end there.

The largest well in the Abkhazian Krubera-Voronya cave, the “Big Cascade”, descends to 152 m; the cave itself, with a known depth of 2196 m, is by far the deepest in the world. The passing record belongs to Ukrainian speleologists.
Age of the Greats geographical discoveries did not end with mapping the last piece of the earth's surface. Today's pioneers rush towards their goals not into the distance, but into the depths, revealing secrets underworld Earth.
Jules Verne's fantastic epic "Journey to the Center of the Earth" anticipated the real penetration of daredevil speleologists into the mysterious inner world planets where underground abysses, grandiose halls, tunnels, wells and galleries, rivers and lakes are discovered. The chronicle of the conquest of the “underground pole” can be traced back to 1723, when the engineer Nagel, by order of the Austrian emperor, reached the bottom in the Macocha abyss in Moravia (-138 m). Then Italy set the record with the Padriciano Cave (-226 m in 1839) and the Trebiciano Cave (-320 m in 1841). Then the deepest caves were considered to be in Switzerland, Austria, and again in Italy. In 1944, the minus 500 m mark was reached in the Dent-de-Crol cave system, France, and almost until the very end of the 20th century. The French dominated the conquest of the cave depths.
The global speleology boom began in the middle of the last century, when a dramatic struggle ensued for the status of not the deepest, but the longest cave in the world. The exploration of giant caves required special effort and preparation (the top three were the American one with a known passage length of 38 km, which over time subsequent expeditions managed to increase to 563 km), the Ukrainian Optimistic cave (known length 230.5 km) and the Swiss Hölloch (156 km). “Under the earth’s surface in absolute darkness there is so much huge world“What can we say about a new continent,” said the famous Swiss speleologist in the pages of National Geographic magazine (Alfred Begley in 1966). The “underground continent” metaphor was immediately supported. Speleological expeditions continue, the study of caves is carried out on a large scale and intensively, the list of record holders is constantly updated as the boundaries expand in breadth and depth. It is not possible to go through the entire cave right through, to the very bottom of the longest passage, on the first try, and not at all. all the pioneers of the underworld manage to return alive. This is a very dangerous path, full of extreme situations, complicated by bottlenecks, rubble and siphons (sections of the tunnel completely flooded with water) of unpredictable length and configuration.
The deeper, the more extreme, and each new breakthrough became a sensation of its time. A depth of 1000 m was overcome in 1956 in the Berger Chasm in the French Alps. The 1500 m mark was reached in 1983 in the Jean-Bernard Chasm, also in France (-1535 m). In 1998, the Lamprechtsofen abyss in the Austrian Alps with a depth of 1630 m (a record for the Polish team) was named the “underground pole” of the Earth. And finally, in 2001, a Ukrainian expedition explored the new deepest cave in the world - Krubera-Voronya on the Arabica massif in the Western Caucasus - to a depth of 1710 m. The previous record was surpassed by 80 m. This became a real sensation not only in the speleological world, news went around all the leading media. At the 13th International Speleological Congress in Brazil in August 2001, the Ukrainian Speleological Association was awarded an honorary prize “For the most outstanding speleological discovery.”
The entrance to the Krubera-Voronya cave is located in the Orto-Balagan valley on the northern side of the Berchil ridge, at an altitude of 2240 m above sea level. m. It is a series of wells connected by climbers and galleries. During the exploration of the cave, the expedition set up several camps inside: at a depth of 1200 m (an area for two tents) and 1400 m. Further descent only in a wetsuit. The siphon at a depth of -2145.5 m continues to the very bottom (finishing 50.5 m underwater).
The Krubera-Voronya karst cave in Abkhazia, explored back in the 1960s by Georgian speleologists, is the current record holder in the “vertical race”. Currently it is considered the deepest in the world.
Back in 1977, the people of Kiev discovered and explored the deepest cave in the USSR at that time - the Kyiv abyss on the Kyrktau plateau in Central Asia, which became the first Soviet “thousandth” (deeper than 1000 m) and the fourth in the world at that time. And the promising Arabica in Abkhazia, with the goal of opening a new deepest cave in the world, began to be explored back in the 1980s. The choice of location was not accidental: the geology and hydrogeology of the massif made it possible to count on super-deep caves. The Krubera-Voronya cave was then explored to a depth of 340 m. With each new expedition, the depth mark dropped lower and lower.
During the 1980s Ukrainian and Russian speleologists explored hundreds of caves in Arabica, including four caves deeper than a kilometer. But the team knew that this was not the limit: in 1984-1985. unique coloring experiment groundwater proved the existence in the depths of Arabica of the world's deepest hydraulic system. The colored water of the source at the top of the mountain, going into the crevices of the cave system, 2300 meters below came out at the foot of the massif through 8 springs. All that remained was to explore and go through this cave labyrinth following the underground waters.
But after the collapse of the USSR, the Georgian-Abkhaz ethnopolitical conflict escalated, escalating into military action in 1992-1993 and 1998. The war interrupted cave exploration. Only in 1999, the glacial valley of Ortobalegan (the most promising Arabica site in terms of caves) was returned by an expedition led by Yuri Kasyan. And immediately a continuation of passages was discovered in the previously explored Krubera-Voronya cave. There was a breakthrough to a depth of 750 m, in August of the following 2000 - to 1200 m, in September of the same year - to 1480 m, and everyone felt: the world record was close. And they organized the third expedition in a year, without waiting for next summer. In winter, at the turn of 2000 and 2001, the cave was explored to the point of collapse at a record depth - 1710 m!
The 2001 world record was not the ultimate dream: the team of speleologists set themselves new goal- overcoming the 2000-meter depth mark in a natural cave. In 2003, Oleg Klimchuk and Denis Provalov (an expedition of the Kyiv Speleo Club and the Cavex team) were able to overcome a flooded area in a small side branch of the Krubera-Voronya cave at a depth of 1440 m and discovered a new branch of the cave system. At that time, it was explored to a depth of 1680 m. In 2007, Ukrainian Gennady Samokhin descended in the Krubera-Voronya cave to a depth of 2191 m, setting a new world record. And relatively recently, in August 2012, an international team of speleologists managed to reach its bottom. The world record for depth in the cave - 2196 m - was set by Gennady Samokhin. The bottom of the cave lay 5 m below the record level of 2007.
The possibility of opening a new, even deeper cave theoretically exists. Experts are confident that the tens of thousands of caves explored today are only a tiny part of the predicted number, and new deep records are ahead, which record-breaking speleologists will be no less proud of than the first climbers who conquered Everest.

general information

The deepest natural cave in the world(at the beginning of 2014).

Type: subvertical karst, the lower part is composed of black limestones.

Location: Arabica mountain range of the Gagra ridge of the Western Caucasus.

Administrative affiliation: Republic of Abkhazia (partially recognized state in accordance with UN resolution - part of Georgia).

Nearest city: Gagra.

Year of discovery: 1960 (the group led by L.I. Maruashvili dropped to 95 m).

Status of the deepest in the world: 2001 (1710 m). The 2000-meter mark was passed in October 2004.

Year complete passage : 2012

Numbers

Known depth: 2196 m.

Total stroke length: 16,058 m.
Most deep well : 152 m.
Cave entrance height: 2240 m above sea level.

Climate

The cave has its own microclimate.

Average annual temperature of air and water at depth: about +5°C.

Relative humidity: about 100%.
The city of Gagra (Gagra) has a humid subtropical climate.

Average annual temperature: + 17°C.
Average January temperature: +12°С.

Average temperature in July: +26°С.
Average annual precipitation: 1700 mm.

Curious facts

■ The cave is named in honor of Alexander Alexandrovich Kruber (1871-1941) - “the father of Russian karstology”, an outstanding physical geographer. Kruber studied karst structures of the East European Plain, Crimea and the Caucasus. The Krubera ridge on Iturup island and a karst cave on the Karabi-yayla plateau in Crimea are also named after him.
■ After setting the world record in 2001 by the Ukrainians (1710 m, Krubera-Voronya cave), the French tried to return the palm and announced that they had reached a depth of 1730 m in the Mirolda cave in the Alps. But then, six months later, they themselves discovered their error in the measurements and abandoned their claims to leadership. National Geographic magazine called that intrigue “The Race to the Center of the Earth.”
■ From the Krubera-Voronya cave at the foot of the Arabica mountain range flows the Reprua River, officially considered the shortest in the world (and the coldest of those flowing into the Black Sea). It is a powerful outlet of an underground karst river, which after 18 m flows into. In fact, it originates on a glacier on the Arabica high plateau at an altitude of 2500 m, 12-15 km from the sea coast.
■ According to forecasts, the maximum depth of a natural mine on our planet can reach 2200-2500 m.
■ The limit of passability in speleology is constantly being pushed back: the arsenal of equipment and technical means used is expanding, and speleologists’ psychological perception of the surmountability of obstacles is also changing. To achieve a record depth, the team can work over several expeditions, setting up intermediate camps and throwing equipment, provisions and oxygen there.