Cave Diving; huge springs; biggest cave on Earth?

quarky

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Greetings.
This thread is aimed at geologists, explorers; cavers; divers, hydrologists, and the merely curious amongst us.

I've had a near obsession with first-magnitude springs for decades. There is something fundamentally alluring about huge gushings of fresh water. Springs are one of the few, obvious 'gifts' to mankind. So many ancient civilizations, and more modern ones as well, have 'sprung up near fresh water springs.

The largest of these; the first magnitude springs, are quite rare, and are defined by output of more than 100 cu.ft/second. I have explored at least 30 of them; mostly in the U.S., but a few in the Mexican Yucatan.

In the U.S., Northern Florida has the most; the south east Missouri Ozarks has a bunch; the rest are mostly in Idaho. The ones in the Ozarks have provided the extra gift of emerging with enough force to power mills to cut wood and grind grain.

In an attempt to locate the oldest, continually flowing source of fresh water on our planet, I've failed to find a consensus of opinion. perhaps we don't know, or don't find the matter significantly relevant. Or, I've missed something obvious.

I have a hypothesis for what i suspect may be the largest cave system on the planet, yet it is unexplored.

Before continuing, do we have any cavers or cave divers on these forums?
 
Life member of NSS, not active caving since I got to be arthritic. :(
 
jj said:
Life member of NSS, not active caving since I got to be arthritic. :(
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I feel that. Painfully so. Hence, the arm-chair curiosity.

I should focus more on a single query here; the search for the oldest continuous flow of fresh water on the planet. Florida's big springs would be ruled out because of how recently those flows were inundated by higher seas.

Ancient uplifts in Canada, and even the Adirondacks are ruled out because of the flow coming to a hault from freezing.

In Australia, not certain, but I suspect drought would rule it out as well.
The southern Appalachian mountains are a possible source of this mythical fresh water flow, yet the Ozark Mountains might be a likelier place to look.

Big Spring, in Carter County, Mo.,US. is my bet for now, as well as my hypothesized largest cave in the world. The gush from that spring makes rapids. AFAIK, explores have been unable to penetrate the opening due to this force.

Yet, dye traces have shown up at that outlet from 40 miles away. This cavern is being excavated to the tune of 175 tons of limestone/day...and has been for many millennium.

An exploration would be doable with some special devices.
I live near Mammoth Cave, incidentally, touted as the largest. Yet I suspect there is a larger cave, in Missouri.
 
I used to do a bit of caving, virtually all of it in Wales. It was a matter of taking opportunites during annual or semi annual visits to friends. I'm too old and stiff nowadays. Abandoned mines still exert a certain morbid fascination on occasion, but that tends to be illegal, so of course I don't actually go in any.
Crawling through dark, cold, tight, muddy cave passages was fun , for a certain meaning of "fun".
Fill the same passage to the roof with muddy water with zero visibility and suddenly , for me, it seemed rather less entertaining.
The videos of cave divers swimming in open, crystal clear water in Mulu or the like really don't reflect the British experience at all.
There's something undeniably magical about running water underground, or river resurgence from cliffs. I was taken to the Wookey show cave in the Mendips when I was about four. It left a lasting impression, as did Malham Cove, some years later. The idea of a river emerging from underground is a mental magnet that draws the mind down into the dark...
 
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Did some cave exploring a while back, and wouldn't mind getting back into it. As for springs, I've been working around Las Vegas recently. LOTS of evidence of old Pleistocene spring deposits out there--we're talking tens of miles in length, and at one point 5 miles in width (I know, because I walked it, with a head cold, in August).

The issue with springs, which makes dating them hard, is that they don't stay put. Spring deposits that I've seen show HIGHLY laterally discontinuous bedding--meaning that you'll get a patch of gravel (where the water comes up, and where the fossils I'm interested in can be found typically) that's between three and three hundred feet wide, then (moving horizontally) nothing but tuffa deposits for between one and several hundred feet, then more spring gravel, then more tuffa....and it's just as complex vertically. The practical side of this is that the spring can move a huge distance in a very, very short time. As part of a groundwater survey I used to take water samples from springs in Alabama, and it was always a pain to find the smaller ones because they'd move 20 feet in any direction over 6 months. (Made my job easy, though--got to spend a lot of time hiking through the woods!)Makes determining the oldest spring difficult, because it complicates the very definition of "oldest spring". Does it mean the oldest spring vent, or the oldest spring system? Then there's the typical issues with dating.
 
Morbid fascination, indeed.
Ever feel drawn to your primeval fears?
I hate caves. I'm claustrophobic as hell.

yet...

So what about the geology part of the o.p.?
That most eternal of flows?

The New River, in West Virginia, has some claim to the 2nd oldest river on Earth. But I'm not so sure. It looked youthful to me; full of energy and vitality.
Which is why i need geologists to help me here.

Any others here drawn to huge springs?
 
Dinwar said:
Did some cave exploring a while back, and wouldn't mind getting back into it. As for springs, I've been working around Las Vegas recently. LOTS of evidence of old Pleistocene spring deposits out there--we're talking tens of miles in length, and at one point 5 miles in width (I know, because I walked it, with a head cold, in August).

The issue with springs, which makes dating them hard, is that they don't stay put. Spring deposits that I've seen show HIGHLY laterally discontinuous bedding--meaning that you'll get a patch of gravel (where the water comes up, and where the fossils I'm interested in can be found typically) that's between three and three hundred feet wide, then (moving horizontally) nothing but tuffa deposits for between one and several hundred feet, then more spring gravel, then more tuffa....and it's just as complex vertically. The practical side of this is that the spring can move a huge distance in a very, very short time. As part of a groundwater survey I used to take water samples from springs in Alabama, and it was always a pain to find the smaller ones because they'd move 20 feet in any direction over 6 months. (Made my job easy, though--got to spend a lot of time hiking through the woods!)Makes determining the oldest spring difficult, because it complicates the very definition of "oldest spring". Does it mean the oldest spring vent, or the oldest spring system? Then there's the typical issues with dating.
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Good answer. There is still endless (and probably pointless) debate as per the largest springs on Earth. If you google the matter, you'll find evidence for Wakulla Spring, in Florida, as being the deepest. Yet, Blue Spring, in Shannon County, Mo., also first magnitude, is at least 50 feet deeper. I've plunged in both many times. Windows to the past, they are. People have been drawn to them for 20,ooo years. And they left stuff behind.

Here's a good one for geologists:
There are springs that ebb and flow, periodically, with little regard for rainfall.
AFAIK, the mechanism remains a mystery. There's a few on the Jack's Fork of the Current River, in the Big Spring region of the south east Missouri Ozarks.

I've tried to envision the possible dynamics of these anomalies...and even have some ideas on the matter. I'd rather here from the pros, if we have any, before spilling my beans.
 
You're outside of my field on that. I don't do groundwater hydrology. I will say that groundwater can have a pretty heafty lag time between rainfall and what happens in the ground, and springs can have sources a huge distance from where the spring itself is. There's also stuff going on inside the ground that can impact spring discharge--for example, if there's high carbonate, silica, or other mineral content in the water it can precipitate out, sealing up flow channels until the water finds another way out (or pressure punches through somewhere) and you start the whole process over again. Still, this is all speculation on my part of what could happen--no clue as to what actually happens.
 
Well, that certainly rules out delayed response. :) Could be deposition and dissolution of minerals, if there's different waters mixing. But again, that's pure speculation. Not sure I've ever actually read anything on this subject (and I know I haven't seen anything first-hand).
 
quarky said:
In Australia, not certain, but I suspect drought would rule it out as well.
The southern Appalachian mountains are a possible source of this mythical fresh water flow, yet the Ozark Mountains might be a likelier place to look.
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You'd be surprised how much water Australia has underground.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Artesian_Basin

And In the wetter areas, in the Great Dividing Range and Tasmania, we do have a lot of caves. I'm not aware of any huge gushing springs from caves though, and the largest in the world definitely isn't here, but we do have some very nice caves nonetheless.

There's probably more than just this, but the only hot spring I know of in Australia is Dalhousie Springs in far Northern South Australia. I've seen plenty of cold springs around, but that's the only hot one I've come across. I haven't spent a lot of time looking though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalhousie_Springs


These are my favourite Australian caves:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenolan_Caves (the first discovered and largest, at over 40km of cave networks, it gets around 250,000 visitors every year and has some very interesting Silurian era Fish fossils)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buchan_Caves
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yarrangobilly_Caves
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naracoorte_Caves_National_Park (Naracoorte Caves is of particular interest, because, along with Riversleigh in Queensland it's the best site in Australia for finding Fossil Marsupials)
 
jj said:
Life member of NSS, not active caving since I got to be arthritic. :(
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Not me.

My wife made me promise her two things: never to dive with sharks, and never to dive in caves. Since neither holds any interest[1] to me, they were very easy promises to keep!

[1]I do want to swim next to a whale shark some day. But that does not count.
 
Cave diving is fascinating to watch, but I must admit that I personally cringe when they take off their gear to fit through a small opening. :(

While I enjoy scuba diving, cave diving gives me the creeps! :) I love watching *OTHER PEOPLE* explore such things, but I'm afraid it's just not my cup of tea. :)
 
To me it is just not very interesting. Certainly not interesting enough to justify the expense and the effort. I love crawling inside sunken shipwrecks though.
 
I like spelunking, and I enjoy scuba diving (haven't done either in awhile tho' :( ), but doing both simultaneously is out of the question. :) I feel claustrophobic enough just standing in a cave without going underwater IN a cave. :)
 
There was a horror movie back a while ago that involved spelunking and a monster. A few of us geology types decided that the monster was superfluous--caves have enough ways to kill you without monsters. Our minds can't really handle true silence or pure darkness. They start making you think you heard something, or saw something. Then you follow it, and splat.
 
quarky said:
An exploration would be doable with some special devices.
I live near Mammoth Cave, incidentally, touted as the largest. Yet I suspect there is a larger cave, in Missouri.
Click to expand...

Does it have air-breathing entrances, though?
 
Used to do a lot back in the early 90's. Spelunking and some academic work in caves. Very rusty now, but scuba and spelunking shall be done by me again in 2012.

Diving with sharks is on my "to do" list. Cave diving, no. Too expensive, too risky.
 
jj said:
Does it have air-breathing entrances, though?
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None that I know of. Yet, I imagine there are huge vacancies within. Exploring it would require a high powered remote with a camera, initially.
Perhaps the water blocked entry disqualifies it as a cave? Not sure.
There are some other springs in that area that are navigable, and have been explored two miles in. Cave spring, on the upper Current River can be entered by canoe. Some fascinating geology in that area. Also quite beautiful. I highly recommend a canoe float, during the off-season.
The Suwanee River in Northern Florida also has some amazing springs, fairly accessible by water, as do some of its tributaries. However, the main river is tannic water. The springs are generally stunningly clear.

Yet I digress in the search for the oldest continual flow of fresh water on the planet. I've googled the query quite a bit, with no answers. Although, there are claims for the oldest continuingly flowing Rivers; one is the New River, in West Virginia. Some irony there.

There are some good you-tubes of cave dives, including some rescues. Indeed, it is a creepy way to die. Peacock Springs, on the Suwanee system has claimed many lives of experienced divers. Usually from silt getting stirred up and visibility lost.
 
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