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Dark, Deep & Delightful

Robbie Shone is one of the world’s top cave explorers. He talks about near-death experiences, the tragedy of vanishing glaciers and why caves may offer up hidden treasures.

By Chris Cummins

Robbie Shone describes caves as “time machines” that take us back to a world that existed hundreds of thousands of years ago. As a photographer he is drawn to these caverns with “fascinating formations” and “pristine environments” that would have looked exactly the same at the time when dinosaurs roamed the Earth.

The National Geographic photographer, who is now based in Innsbruck, has been exploring the hidden landscape of caves across the world for the past 20 years. His love affair with the dark underworld began on a sort of blind date. He was studying Fine Arts at Sheffield University when a rock-climbing friend persuaded him to join him on a caving trip.

“It was literally love at first sight the moment I went into this cave in the Yorkshire Dales. Within a minute I’d gone into this world and realized that I wanted more. It wasn’t going to be something that I did every weekend; it was going to do it for the rest of my life.”

a dark cave

Robbie Shone

That said, his passion almost cost him his life when he and a team of explorers and scientists were surprised at the bottom of world’s deepest cave, Veryovkina, in Abkhazia, Georgia. This giant labyrinth delves to a depth 2,000 vertical metres below the Earth’s surface and exploring it is like making an Everest expedition in reverse. It takes 4-days to reaching the deepest point with three camps along the way.

A Rude Awakening

The team, who had entered the cave in sunny, stable September at the end of a dry summer were, after 7 days, settling into to a regime of scientific study and photography when everything changed. “Everything was going fine,” remembers Robbie, “We thought we were safe because no rain had been forecast for the next week.”

But then, as the team were having breakfast at the lowest camp, when a pulse of flooding wave surprised them. A freak storm had sent a ferocious mass of water hurtling down the arteries of the cave (later a local farmer would describe raindrops “the size of a thumbnail”).

“We heard what sounded like a freight-train hurtling down a tunnel towards you,” remembers Robbie. “It started off very faint and then got persistently louder.” They left their tents and went to look at the shaft above. “Eventually this whole wall of white water just burst out of the hole in the roof where our rope was going through: our way out was through the same hole!” Soon the water had filled half the massive void they had been exploring.

A beautiful cave

Robbie Shone

Above, hour after hour, the rain kept falling. Below, hour after hour, the shaft kept filling with water. A siphon, a passage in a cave that is submerged under water, had started bubbling with brown water showing that the water table was rising from below. When Robbie’s Russian expedition mate Peter saw that ominous sign he went “as white as a ghost.”

By this time Robbie and the rest of the team were in a race against time for survival. He didn’t have the time of the capacity to rescue his photography equipment, so he just grabbed the flash-cards and zipped them in a waterproof pocket. He and the team climbed up the ropes as the weight of falling water pounded down on their heads.

„I though my number was up!“

At one point they spent 16-hour on a ledge trapped between a flooded section above and the rising water-table below that was capturing up with them. “At that point I really believed my number was up,” Robbie remembers. “I thought this is where it is all going to end, in the deepest cave in the world.”

Miraculously they all made it out alive. There were few signs of the days of rain as they finally surfaced into daylight again. Just as in the day they had set out, the sun was out. “It felt like we’d just had a really bad nightmare. But that took some getting over!”

a canoe

Robbie Shone

His adventures have also taken him to the South American landscape that inspired Arthur Conan-Doyle’s Lost World. The Tepuis, the flat table-top mountains of Venezuela, often look like islands in a sea od clouds and they are home hundreds of endemic plant and animal species. And inside these mountains, there are deep caves of quartzite rock that Robbie describes as “other worldly”.

The Beauty of Bacteria

Unusual bacteria grow in these caves and Robbie and his team found a lake with a skin of bacteria growing on that he says “almost reflected like oil so when I was photographing it the lights were giving off this rainbow effect on the surface of the lake in a way I have never seen before.”

There were also microbiologists in the team sampling life-forms that had never been identified before. They were hoping to find the key to tackle the terrifying increase in antibiotic resistance. We simply don’t know how many kilometres of caves there are in the world, so we don’t know how much is still left to explore. Tantalizingly, there could be all sorts of valuable secrets still to be discovered.

an ice cave

Robbie Shone

Closer to home, it is the ice caves of the Alpine glaciers that fascinate Robbie. “Glaciers are incredible things and we are very lucky to have them,” he says, “but we won’t be having them for much longer, unfortunately, because obviously the ice is melting.”

He says the ice caves are incredibly photogenic because they are blue and with lights different thicknesses of light give off different intensities of blue.
By photographing them now, he is providing documentation of a vanishing world. “It’s a sad story especially for those who have grown up with glaciers all around them and who will see their children and grandchildren without these things.”

The vanishing glaciers

Robbie Shone

Twenty years into his career, and even after that near-disaster in Veryovkina, Robbie Shone’s passion for caves remains undiminished.

“In a cave, you really don’t know what you are going to find when you turn a corner. We know so much about this planet; so much about the surface of this planet. Some might say we’ve helped destroy the surface of the planet with human activity. But with the caves, they are untouched, unspoiled and it is a privilege to explore them.”

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