> Oxygen levels run at roughly half of what our lungs expect. Carbon dioxide is present at concentrations enormously higher than in the outside atmosphere. The air is laced with hydrogen sulfide, the compound responsible for the smell of rotten eggs, and with methane and ammonia.

So it was not truly sealed. A truly sealed cave would have had no oxygen, it would have all been consumed in reactions with methane.

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dyauspitr 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah it has significant groundwater inflow (like 5L/s). Nothing about this is sealed.

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john_strinlai 9 hours ago | parent [-]

>Yeah it has significant groundwater inflow (like 5L/s).

where did it say this? i did a double-take because the article says the opposite, and i checked the wikipedia and didnt see it there either. is there another source of info? or am i being blind?

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dyauspitr 7 hours ago | parent [-]

> Mesothermal, sulfidic groundwater (up to 1 mM in H2S) originating from an artesian sulfidic aquifer underlying the region enters at the bottom of the cave’s lower passages. This results in a constant flow occurring tens of centimeters to 1 m below the water surface at flow rates of about 5 L/s

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10672346/

	▲	0-_-0 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Right, so it was sealed only in the biological sense, which makes sense since there needs to be an inflow of energy

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shdwslrkr 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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