*****
Earth's deepest known hole found in Croatia

Mark Glassman,  New York Times
August 22, 2004 DEEPHOLE0822

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- A team of Croatian cavers found the world's deepest hole this month.

Darko Baksic, the expedition leader, and his colleagues reached the bottom of the 1,693-foot pit at the back of a dark cave in the Velebit Mountains, southwest of Zagreb. It is 217 feet deeper than the former record holder in Austria known as Hollenhohle.

Sophisticated mapping has left little room for dumb luck in surface exploration. But maps do not chart what lies beneath the land or the ocean floor.

"I'm not at all surprised that we're still making these sorts of discoveries," Lisa R. Gaddis, the program chief of the U.S. Geological Survey's astrogeology team, said. "I think we have perhaps a better global picture of some other terrestrial planets, like Mars, than we have of some of the more remote areas on Earth."

When it comes to caves, noted David E. Smith, the chief of NASA's Laboratory for Terrestrial Physics, "we can't see anything from space." He added, "You can't really say very much, if anything at all, about below the surface."

The new find is not the deepest cave on Earth. That title still belongs to the Krubera Cave in Abkhazia, a former Soviet republic. It descends 5,130 feet (almost a mile).

Cavers define a hole, or pit, as a straight vertical drop, sometimes interrupted by ledges, that is too steep to walk down. "Until the era of modern speleology, pits often stopped incursions into caves," according to the Atlas of the Great Caves of the World. Today, most pits are explored by shimmying down ropes.

Baksic's team, which is converting its field drawings into precise maps for publication, found the record-setting hole while exploring another cavern nearby. "People don't tend to go and search for these things," Smith said. "They tend to find them more or less by accident, while exploring."

The underworld remains a kind of last frontier for explorers looking for new discoveries. "It takes a special kind of person who is willing to walk, crawl a mile underground in pitch black," Smith said.

Cave explorers are among the last amateurs. "For me, it's like a profession," said Andrej Stroj, a member of the team that found the record-setting abyss in Croatia, "but for others, it's mostly a hobby."

Jim Chester, a fellow of the Explorers Club in New York, received the National Speleological Society's highest award for cave exploration last year for his work charting caverns in Montana. But caving does not pay his bills.

"All the stuff I do with caves is on the weekends or vacation," said Chester, 60. During the week, he is a postal worker.

Cavers do not have the technology available to scientists such as Smith or Gaddis.

"You've got to physically do it," said Bob Gulden, a Maryland engineer. Ground-penetrating radar could detect the presence of an underground cavity, he said, but that equipment is too expensive and impractical for ordinary cavers.

Cavers rely on old tricks to find new caves, such as hunting for depressions in the snow or tracing the passage of water through a mountain. Chester said his group occasionally takes aerial scouting trips in the winter to search for "smoking entrances," or pockets of steam rising from the snow that could indicate warm air rising through a cave system.

"We do not know what the deepest cave on this planet is," Chester said, "and unless there is some big breakthrough, like a CAT scan for the Earth, we may never know."
*****

I recall that South African gold mines or diamond mines are now more than a mile deep. Some time ago I posted an article about scientists finding in situ bacteria in rock more than a mile below the surface and living off sulfates (?) in the rock.

Mrs H

Warning: Dangerous U.S. Volcanoes Not Properly Monitored
By Robert Roy Britt
LiveScience Senior Writer
posted: 29 April 2005
09:53 am ET

Dangerous volcanoes in six states are not adequately monitored, U.S. Geological Survey officials said Friday. The agency called for a new nationwide warning system.

Geologists conducted a new survey of the 169 known U.S. volcanoes and ranked them according to their threat to human life, property and aviation safety.

Alaska, California, Washington State, Oregon, Hawaii, Wyoming all have "dangerous volcanoes with monitoring gaps or no monitoring in place," the report concludes.

"We cannot afford to wait until a hazardous volcano begins to erupt before deploying a modern monitoring effort," said USGS Director Chip Groat. "The consequences put property and people at risk – including volcano scientists on site and pilots and passengers in the air."

Though volcanoes erupt sporadically, the risk is real.

747 nearly lost

"We nearly lost a fully loaded Boeing 747 to volcanic ash cloud in Alaska in 1989," said Capt. Ed Miller of the Air Line Pilots Association.

Miller said a partnership with the USGS now provides warnings that help pilots avoid such plumes. When Mount St. Helens woke up last October and spewed ash, the USGS Cascades Volcano Observatory notified air traffic control centers within five minutes.

By placing seismic instruments and other sensors on a volcanic mountain, geologists can detect early warning signs of possible eruptions and also note eruptions that are underway in remote locations. About half of the most threatening volcanoes are monitored at a basic level, the report found, while only a few are well watched.

"Monitoring capabilities at many hazardous volcanoes are sparse or antiquated, and some hazardous volcanoes have no ground-based monitoring whatsoever," the report states.

Eventually ...

Super Volcano Will Challenge Civilization, Geologists Warn

The report calls for a National Volcano Early Warning System (NVEWS) that would create a 24/7 Volcano Watch Office.

"This is the only way to forewarn communities at risk in enough time to activate emergency response plans, and ultimately help save lives and property," Groat said.

The hotspots

Since 1980, there have been 45 eruptions at 33 volcanoes in the United States. Of those, 15 were considered notable, the report found.

The report found 13 "very high threat volcanoes" with inadequate monitoring. Though some erupt infrequently and may be dormant now, geologists expect them to eventually reawaken, and many are near large population center. The list:

Alaska: Redoubt, Makushin, Akutan, and Augustine
California: Shasta, Lassen
Oregon: Hood, South Sister, Crater Lake, Baker, Newberry
Washington: Rainier, Glacier Peak

USGS officials and geologists plans to meet with federal agencies, state and county emergency management agencies, businesses and other organizations to finalize plans for the nationwide early warning system.

Yellowstone is back in business! Thought you'd like to read about this report:
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Yellowstone Listed as High Eruption Threat
YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, Wyo. (May 9) - The Yellowstone caldera has been classified a high threat for volcanic eruption, according to a report from the U.S. Geological Survey.

Yellowstone ranks 21st most dangerous of the 169 volcano centers in the United States, according to the Geological Survey's first-ever comprehensive review of the nation's volcanoes.

Kilauea in Hawaii received the highest overall threat score followed by Mount St. Helens and Mount Rainer in Washington, Mount Hood in Oregon and Mount Shasta in California.

Kilauea has been erupting since 1983. Mount St. Helens, which erupted catastrophically in 1980, began venting again in 2004.

Those volcanoes fall within the very high threat group, which includes 18 systems. Yellowstone is classified with 36 others as high threat.

Recurring earthquake swarms, swelling and falling ground, and changes in hydrothermal features are cited in the report as evidence of unrest at Yellowstone.

The report calls for better monitoring of the 55 volcanoes in the very high and high threat categories to track seismic activity, ground bulging, gas emissions and hydrologic changes.

University of Utah geology professor Robert Smith, who monitors earthquakes and volcanic activity in Yellowstone, said more real-time monitoring should be helpful.

''We've really been stressing over the last couple of years that the USGS should consider hazards as a very high priority in their future,'' he said. ''We need to get the public's confidence and the perception that we're doing it right.''

The university has joined the Geological Survey and Yellowstone National Park in creating the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory, which uses ground-based instruments throughout the region and satellite data to monitor volcanic and earthquake unrest in the world's first national park.

The USGS report recognizes Yellowstone as an unusual hazard because of the millions of people who visit the park and walk amid features created by North America's largest volcanic system, Smith said, a status he has been advocating for years.

Smith does not paint the devastating picture portrayed in a recent TV docudrama but said smaller threats exist. For example, a lower-scale hydrothermal blast could scald tourists strolling along boardwalks.

Emissions of toxic gases from the park's geothermal features also pose a threat. Five bison dropped dead last year after inhaling poisonous gases trapped near the ground due to cold, calm weather near Norris Geyser Basin.

Stepped up monitoring and a new 24-hour watch office could lead to more timely warnings and help avoid human catastrophes at Yellowstone and nationally, according to the USGS.

Forty-five eruptions, including 15 cases of notable volcanic unrest, have been documented at 33 volcanoes in the U.S. since 1980, according to the report, released April 29.

05-09-05 20:14 EDT