Carlsbad Caverns!
If every mountain has been climbed and almost every dry piece of land on Earth has been explored, what parts are left to explore? The answer is the oceans and what is below the Earth’s crust like caves and caverns. Could you put on a hard hat and rappel down a rope into a 750 foot deep hole just to see what is there? In 1898 a 16 year old cowboy named Jim White was riding across the desert when he thought he saw smoke. He decided to get closer and what he found was the bats streaming out of the mouth of a huge cavern. A few days later he went back, and with no safety gear he began to explore the caverns.
Caves and caverns are not the same thing even though some people think they are. All caverns are caves but not all caves are caverns. Did I confuse you? Both are openings in rock formations but a cave can be as small as your fist. A cavern is a large room and some are enormous! The most famous natural caverns in the world are in New Mexico. If someone 250 million years ago had gone to see these caverns they would not have been there. What they would have found was an inland sea and reef full of life. As the sea receded the reef was covered by sediment and soil. Fault lines, earthquakes and erosion along with water and a lot of time created the caves. So far 120 caves have been found, could there be more?
Visitors who go to Carlsbad Caverns may see animals that live nowhere else but the National Park, like the Carlsbad crickets. The most famous animals at the park are the Brazilian free-tailed bat. At dusk about 200,000 to as many as a million bats swirl out into the desert night to hunt for food. There are more bats during the migration season. People sit quietly to see a black cloud of bats come out of the caverns. The bats are nocturnal and sleep in the caverns during the day and hunt at night. They use echolocation. Echolocation is the ability to use sound to navigate.
Every cavern is individual in its characteristics. The most amazing things to see are the stalagmites, stalactites, soda straws and other speleothems. As water slowly dripped into the caves, minerals built up creating a magical world. Most of these were created thousands of years ago, but if you look closely you may still see a drip or two making its way down from the ceiling. The largest cavern is called the Big Room. You can fit almost 7 football fields in this space! This cavern is almost a mile and a half long.
In the back part of the National Park a new wonderland was discovered called Lechuguilla Cave. People knew about the cave as early as 1914 but in 1986 real exploration began. So far the cave has been mapped to be 1,604 feet deep and 149 miles long. The pictures that have been shared show a cave system that can only be imagined. Not just anyone gets to go inside Lechuguilla. Only scientists, national park service employees, surveyors and special exploration teams get to go in because it is the perfect place to study the rock formations inside of the Earth’s crust. Some people have moved to New Mexico just to be able to spend more time in Lechuguilla. Could you do that?