Insanely dangerous, and even well marked, frequently explored caves can abruptly turn deadly even for experienced cavers. Still more terrifying is cave diving, in which explorers descend by up to hundreds of meters through winding, claustrophobic, narrow caves entirely filled with water.

At least with "dry" cave exploration, if you get stuck, you might survive up to several days with a hope of rescue, assuming you can stay hydrated and not freeze to death. With submerged cave exploration, the minute you run into serious trouble, the clock starts ticking with life lasting only as long as your air tanks. The stuff of nightmares.

This YouTube channel covers many of these accidents and incidents really well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2xs90tbEeY

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7thaccount 7 months ago | parent | next [-]

Even with dry caves, you have issues with flooding like what happened in Thailand. One minute you're a kid on a outing with a soccer team and the next thing you know a little monsoon on the outside traps you and you're stuck in a pocket area for a week before some dentist cave divers can anesthetize you and drag you back. I watched a documentary on it...crazy stuff.

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JusticeJuice 7 months ago | parent | next [-]

It was such an amazing rescue. I don't think the general public at the time really understood how incredibly stuck they were. I mean at one point the best solution was really looking like waiting half a year until the monsoon season finishes. There was just no brute-force solution, they couldn't dig them out, they couldn't pump out the water, they couldn't find another way in.

	▲	jjeaff 7 months ago \| parent [-]
		the rescue included brute force as well as strategy. they had to run all their pumps just to keep the water levels near the entrance from rising too high for the rescue operation. they were basically fighting against the ever rising water levels just to keep them steady.

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southernplaces7 7 months ago | parent | prev [-]

Agreed, hence my quotation marks around the word dry above. Some caves genuinely stay dry because of their structure or location, and others can suddenly, lethally flood. but even the truly dry ones can kill in no time just like that through a litany of terrible reasons, experts and amateurs both being victims.

It would however be a bad idea for someone to assume a truly dry cave is thus safe enough to let their guard down because they know how much more dangerous flood-prone or submerged caves are.

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cyanwave 7 months ago | parent | prev [-]

I knew it was Scary Interesting before clicking. :)