Crow Cave - a mysterious and deadly “underground Everest”

The Crow Cave, or Krubera Cave, is considered the deepest in the world. This may not be true, but none of the caves explored to date can compare with its depth. Its lowest point is at 2196 meters. It is likely that it is even deeper, but so far we have been able to study it so far.

The Crow Cave is located in the Arabica mountain range in the Gagra range in Abkhazia. There is a whole network of underground voids in this area. The cave branches into two main branches: Nekuibyshevskaya and Main. The depth of the first, 1300 meters, is also impressive, but the record holder is the Main one with its studied 2196 meters.

The cave is of karst origin and belongs to the subvertical type. It has several vertical wells, the deepest of which are 115, 110 and 152 meters. At the bottom of the main branch there are 8 siphons, at depths from 1400 to 2144 meters. They are filled with water and you can only go there with scuba gear.

Another record is associated with the cave. The shortest river in the world, the Reprua, is fed by its underground waters. Its length is only 18 meters and it flows into the Black Sea. The record-breaking river originates deep underground, and the water in it is incredibly cold even in the summer heat. The entire cave is located in a layer of limestone, and below 1600 meters this sedimentary rock is black.

The cave was discovered relatively recently, in 1960. This was done by Georgian speleologists, who were then able to descend only to a depth of 90 meters. Then no one suspected that Voronya was a record-breaking cave, which would later be called “underground Everest” for its depth. The discoverers named it in honor of the father of Russian karst studies A. A. Kruber.

In 1968, the Krubera cave was visited by an expedition from Krasnoyarsk, which called it Siberian. After that, they forgot about it for many years and began to study it again only in the mid-80s. Ukrainian speleologists managed to descend to a depth of 340 meters. It was they who gave the cave its most famous, “folk” name - Voronya.

The Abkhaz-Georgian war of 1992–1993 prevented scientists from accessing this underground system. The next expedition, again Ukrainian, arrived at the cave only in 1999. This time the researchers stopped at a depth of 700 meters. But a year later the guys returned and improved the record twice, to 1410 meters. In 2001, a joint Ukrainian-Russian team reached 1710 meters. The speleologists would have advanced further, but they ran into an impassable blockage.

But in August 2003, a private Cavex team found a workaround and, after overcoming a siphon of water, descended along another branch to 1680 meters. The guys reported that further passage was clear, but they did not have enough resources to continue exploring the cave. They returned in 2004 and reached a depth of 1775 meters.

But the record did not last long. Also in 2004, an expedition from Ukraine stopped at 1840 meters, and a couple of months later reported reaching 2080 meters. In 2010, a Lithuanian team from the Aenigma cave diving club descended to 2,140 meters in the Voronya cave. The team of 4 people had a record holder - athlete Saule Pankenė became the first woman in the world at such a depth.

The deepest point of the Voronya-Krubera cave was 2196 meters. Ukrainian speleologist from Simferopol Gennady Samokhin was able to descend this deep. He claims that the voids go even deeper, but at around 2200 meters the path is blocked by another siphon.

Descending to Voronya is an incredibly dangerous, difficult and costly endeavor. The Ukrainian expedition, which set a record, delivered 150 liters of gasoline for Primus stoves, 500 kilograms of food, and 3,000 batteries to great depths. Speleologists set up 7 camps; the deepest of which, "Rebus", set a world record at a depth of 1960 meters. The descent to 2196 meters took a whole month.