#speleothemes

[spiritheyregone]

"Lily pad room" at Onondaga Cave State Park, Missouri. (Flickr)

[wuzhere75]

Images from Wikipedia I am obsessed with part 5: SPELEOTHEMS! SPELEOTHEMS! SPELEOTHEMS!

[iamthepulta]

Caving went great! It was so much fun to rappel down and immediately get a glimpse of fantastic (if often broken) features. The rest of the cave was more fault-based and maze-like. Most of our time was spent moving diagonally on fault scarp clay (slipperiest shit I have EVER been on) and rappelling out (possibly the hardest climb up a fault scarp I have ever made lol).

Bottom left pic was taken three inches away on my belly in the entrance crawlspace. I was so happy to see little active formations so close.

[medeaft]

Sinister cave 2023 Acrylic on paper

This is a commission I much enjoyed working on; the client was kind enough to give me permission to post it.

Now, having dedicated an entire picture to painting speleothems, I can see that I like painting them even more than I thought.

[crumb]

Whipple Cave, Nevada (1972)

[my-name-is-not-victoria]

Nov 4, 2023

Unexpectedly, I got to do some scrambling around underground today! Wasn't a great big cave, but it had some very decorated little nooks and crannies.

[planet4546b]

sees a cave post going around. thinks surely i’ve ided it. checks notes. i did not. remembers i didn’t reblog it because i got mad that people can only appreciate caves when they’re pretty. appreciate the humble and frightening beauty of caves at their most ‘ordinary’ (although nothing in a cave is ordinary) with me

[kino-free-time]

Speleothems in Lehman Cave

Lehman Cave, near the Nevada-Utah border, is not a large cave but it does have some spectacular formations (speleothems). Here we see a vareity of flowstone, columns and stalactites. Speleothems form over long times when calcite (and rarely other minerals) precipitate from dripping or flowing groundwater.

source

[mosswolf]

speleoTHEM? all this liberal nonsense. back in MY day it was speleoHIM!!!

[archaeologyinbulgaria]

6,000-Year-Old Submerged Cave Bridge Discovered in Spain’s Mallorca Shows When Mediterranean Was Settled

New research of a submerged bridge inside Genovesa Cave reveals humans lived on the Spanish island of Mallorca in the Mediterranean Sea much earlier than believed. Photo: R. Landreth/CNN A recently analyzed submerged bridge in Genovesa Cave on the Spanish island of Mallorca is reshaping scientists’ understanding of when humans first settled the islands of the western Mediterranean Sea. This…

[speosilex-brasov-speologie]

🇬🇧 Water surface tension effect in a spectacular column that formed rimstone levels at its base. It was found in the farthest place from the entrance in Ponorul Suspendat cave, a 10 km cave in Southern Carpathians, in a 5 day bivouac trip, after exploring nearly 1 km of new passages when a sump dried up in the north part of the cave following a very dry autumn. 🇷🇴 La sfârșitul lui 2021, în P. Ponorul Suspendat, după explorarea noului colector din nordul peșterii, una din galeriile din capăt a devenit tot mai strâmtă până nu am mai putut trece. După derocarea galeriei strâmte am gasit una din cele mai spectaculoase formațiuni descoperite vreodată: o coloană la baza căreia s-a format o "cascadă" de gururi. Tensiunea superficială a apei face ca suprafața acesteia să fie "curbată" pe marginea micilor bazine, în combinație cu adâncimea și forma lor rezultând un efect optic de lupă ce mărește micile coralite de pe fundul bazinului, un efect greu de surprins în poze, de-a dreptul hipnotizant. Probabil nu întâmplător acest loc se află în punctul cel mai îndepartăt din peșteră. #PonorulSuspendat #SpeoSilex #explorare #speleothems #formations #SilexBrasov #pestera #Cerna #Capatanii #pestera #MuntiiCapatanii #Cerna #RoCaving #RoSpeleo #PesteraPonorulSuspendat #CapataniiMountains #Capatanii #SouthernCarphatians #Carphatians #Romania #caving #speleology #speologie #formațiuni https://www.instagram.com/p/CqDyMlyo6Xi/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[spiritheyregone]

Lake Castrovalva area of Lechuguilla Cave in Carlsbad Caverns National Park, New Mexico. (Robbie Shone)

[mirecnet]

Krásy podzemia, ktoré nikdy neomrzia #surveylife #surveyday #surveyincome #surveyincome #landsurveying #speleosurvey #speleologia #speleoday #speleothem #speleotherapy #caveexploring #caverland #caveman #caveday https://www.instagram.com/p/Cj8qViOLvGQ/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[emilybeemartin]

Just to tie in my two themes this month----

Additional notes, because poll options apparently limit their characters:

Frodo finds great peace in watching the tides rise and fall throughout each day. He attends all the ranger programs on birds and seashells and fills pages with sketches and poetry.

Sam meticulously selects postcards in the gift shop for each of his friends and spends a whole morning writing and addressing them. He also buys Junior Ranger hats for his kids and a variety of Appalachian jams for Rosie.

Park rangers launch a Missing Person search for Aragorn when they realize his car's been parked at Avalanche Creek for three days. The search runs for almost a week before he comes strolling out the opposite side of the park, supporting one of the SAR techs who twisted an ankle during the search.

Legolas is first drawn to Olympic for the towering, mossy temperate rainforests, but the ground goes out from under him when he steps onto Second Beach for the first time. He spends an entire day watching the light and tides shift on the sea stacks, and he leaves feeling both full and hollow, like a bell that's just been rung.

Mammoth is only Gimli's first stop on a cavern tour, followed by Jewel and Wind Caves and Carlsbad Caverns. Wind Cave is his favorite for the unusual formations. He makes an obnoxious tween boy cry in Carlsbad for breaking off a speleothem.

Boromir is on a tour of military parks. He asks so many questions to the intern working the info station at Fort Sumter the kid has to go find the park historian. His favorite site is Vicksburg because that place was buckwild, though he silently judges one of the reenactors for his clumsy handling of a black powder rifle.

Merry also makes stops in Jurassic and Dinosaur National Monuments. He watches every park video, takes selfies in front of all the fossil exhibits, and earns his Junior Ranger badge at each one. He buys a keychain for Pippin.

Pippin actually gets four citations, mostly for trying to stick his hands in mud pots. He doesn't mean anything by it---he's just so delighted and curious about the bizarre landscape. He winds up with several thermal burns and dumps a king's ransom in the donation box on his last day.

Gandalf gets dinged by rangers for not paying the $5 fee for Trunk Bay, but he acts senile until they eventually decide to drop it. He gets postcards from everyone and responds to none of them.

Faramir and Eowyn are traveling together and do many of the same hikes and rides, but they do have some different preferences off-trail. Eowyn drags Faramir to a rodeo and the Million Dollar Cowboy Bar in Jackson Hole, and he goads her into Ranger Shelton Johnson's living history programs on the Buffalo Soldiers in Yosemite.

Eomer is bike-packing on his sport cruiser motorcycle. He goes to Roosevelt south unit for the wild horse herds but ends up spending half a day watching a prairie dog town. He takes 400 photos of them, mostly blurry, and texts them to Eowyn.

[transgenderer]

Early Neanderthal constructions deep in Bruniquel Cave in southwestern France

Very little is known about Neanderthal cultures1, particularly early ones. Other than lithic implements and exceptional bone tools2, very few artefacts have been preserved. While those that do remain include red and black pigments3 and burial sites4, these indications of modernity are extremely sparse and few have been precisely dated, thus greatly limiting our knowledge of these predecessors of modern humans5. Here we report the dating of annular constructions made of broken stalagmites found deep in Bruniquel Cave in southwest France. The regular geometry of the stalagmite circles, the arrangement of broken stalagmites and several traces of fire demonstrate the anthropogenic origin of these constructions. Uranium-series dating of stalagmite regrowths on the structures and on burnt bone, combined with the dating of stalagmite tips in the structures, give a reliable and replicated age of 176.5 thousand years (±2.1 thousand years), making these edifices among the oldest known well-dated constructions made by humans. Their presence at 336 metres from the entrance of the cave indicates that humans from this period had already mastered the underground environment, which can be considered a major step in human modernity.

The six structures are composed only of speleothems or fragments of speleothems (speleofacts), aligned and superimposed (A, B) (Extended Data Fig. 2a, b), or accumulated (C, D, E, F). A′ is a likely extension of A. Their contours are sometimes imprecise due to the calcite layer and stalagmitic regrowths that cover them. The orange spots represent the heated zones, all located on the construction elements. The red spot (structure B) represents a char concentration (mainly burnt bone fragments) on the ground (Extended Data Fig. 3, bottom left).

extremely old very strange neanderthal structures deep in a cave. one of the most exciting neanderthal results ive ever learned about, it so deeply impractical! there's no reason to go that deep in the cave, or to set fires on top of your weird stalactite pile, it feels certainly ritual!

[lorienfae]

Submerged

in soporific stillness,

these speleothem thoughts

fade out

and mind glimmers in echoes

of knowing

that faith is true.

Tree branches whisper

be free, be free, be

and the cosmos itself

vibrates

in feeling.

© Anna S. 2024