Caves With The Deepest Drop
A vertical drop or shaft is a place in a cave where the caves has to abseil.
He needs a rope which is long enough, and so he needs to know the depth of the
shaft.
Going down the pit means a very long abseil to the bottom.
A lot of energy transformed into heat, a problem for rope and abseil equipment.
Also it is necessary to climb up the shaft along the rope in a method called
single rope technique (SRT).
There are two different list of shafts, one is about the deepest underground
drops, one about daylight shafts, ahafts starting at the surface.
Underground drops are completely underground, inside a cave.
Daylight
There is a problem with those drops, a sort of definition problem.
There are pitches, daylight shafts, and single drops.
A single drop is a vertical section underground, where you abseil all the
way with a single rope.
A pitch may be broken, which means it has a ledge or you need a rebelay.
A daylight shafts starts at the surface, which means the daylight shines
into the shaft, hence the name.
There are both single drops and pitches.
So you have four different kinds of drops.
Underground Single Drops
 Velebita, Croatia |
513m |
Underground Pitch
| Vrtoglavica, Slovenia |
This cave, located inside Monte Kanin, has a 603m pitch.
|
| Lukina jama, Croatia |
The deepest cave of Croatia is 1,392m deep and only 1,078m long.
It has a single pitch of 516m, making it the cave with the longest vertical drop in
the world.
|
| Brezno pod Velbom, Slovenia |
This cave is 541m deep, but it has a 501m deep shaft, which is blockesd at -377m by a ledge.
|
| Höllenhöhle, Austria |
Has a 450m deep shaft.
|
| Altes Murmeltier, Austria |
Has a 480m deep shaft with a ledge and a 307m deep single drop part.
|
Daylight shafts
| El Sótano (de El Barro),
Querétaro state, México.
|
The deepest entrance pit of the world is 410m deep. |
| Sótano de las Golondrinas,
|
It is the second deepest entrance drop of the world, 376m deep, and a challenge
for any caver.
|
See also
