The February abyss - outcrop of raft stalagmites, unexpected fruit
Shooting the next episode our series about a quarter century at Amerika took us to “Únorová propast“ - "The February abyss". The elite of our club participated right here in explorations of underground labyrinths of the famous quarry in the early eighties.
The action took place on Saturday on the 13th of February, 2016. We chose this date a bit intentionally in order to emphasize the relation to the then discovery and name of the locality. According to the original plan, we had to come to “Únorovka” (or rather, wade) and from there dive through and shoot what we could. Due to the high water level it was necessary to lightly improvise underground and to extend our plan a little bit. The access drifts were actually in some places wholly and in others almost wholly under the water level and therefore it was necessary to dive through the whole drift system.
It turned out after all that it was not only perfect diving but thanks to presence of UW video camera we managed to shoot a lot. It is obvious from the footage that besides other things in the flooded drifts, there came into view interesting karstic and immensely beautiful formations as previously discovered in the Hranická abyss. These underwater cones, which were for sure pleasing not only to the speleoaquanaut’s eye, were formerly called geyser dripstones. As we later learned, in our case, it is a typical example of this natural effect, presently called raft or dusted stalagmites. The on-surface floating and precipitated calcite is at specific points bombarded with drops of water which flow down from the ceiling of the drift. Afterwards, the floating layer of calcite is sunk at this point and creates at the bottom, as time goes by, a gritting cone. It is also of interest that the effect hadn’t been observed by our forerunners in these sections which means that it concerns a relatively rapidly emerging effect. The captured pictures impressed even experts in the field, which is always good…
Conclusion
The Action was successful beyond expectation. More shots will be made in the next few days and the third part our series will be published soon. Some details in the map of the area were supplemented during the action as well. An occurrence of this interesting karstic effect was detected. The details of the current situation at the locality have been verified.
DrKozel
trans: Marek Š.
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Participants:
Speleoaquanaut
Speleodivers: Petr Chmel, DrKozel, Lemi
Movie: Mejla D
SRT climbers: Švejda M, Švejda J, Pepa Kanta
Guests
Support team: Jan Onheiser, Alexandr Kadlec, Andrea
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