Speleologists first learned about the existence of the Krubera-Voronya cave in the Arabica mountain range in Abkhazia in 1960. Then they managed to descend only 95 meters. The cave was classified as shallow and forgotten for 8 years. During the second attempt to explore the cave, the cavers reached a depth of 210 meters, the third expedition reached 340 meters.
From that moment on, each subsequent expedition set itself the main goal of descending as low as possible. However, with each new descent, only the number of discovered passages and branches increased, while the exact depth of the cave continued to remain a mystery. In 2001, another team of cave climbers reached a record depth of 1710 meters, which allowed the official classification of the Krubera-Voronya cave as the deepest cave on the planet.
The Arabica mountain range, in which the cave is located, is located 15 kilometers northeast of the resort of Gagra.
Krubera-Voronya is a sub-vertical karst cave. It consists of a series of wells connected by passages and galleries.
The first entrance to the cave is located at an altitude of about 2250 m above sea level in the Orto-Balagan tract. The second entrance to the cave, which was discovered in August 2014, is located 3 meters higher than the first.
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At a depth of 200 meters, the cave branches into two main branches: the Nekuibyshevskaya (in 2010, the depth is 1697 m) and the Main branch (the current depth is up to 2196 m). Starting from a depth of 1300 meters, the main branch branches out into many other branches.
More than 8 siphons are known in the bottom part (located at depths from 1400 to 2144 m). The cave is located in a limestone strata, while the bottom part from a depth of 1600 meters is laid in black limestones.
Until June 2001, Lamprechtsofen cave, 1632 meters deep, located in the Northern Limestone Alps, was considered the deepest cave in the world, until the expedition of the Ukrainian Speleological Association with the participation of Moscow cavers set a world record, reaching 1710 meters in the Krubera-Voronya cave.
The mark of 1710 meters for the cave was not the limit. In the course of subsequent expeditions, the cavers announced that they were entering a new depth.
In 2004, the Krubera Voronya Cave became the only known cave in the world with a depth of more than 2000 meters. On October 19, for the first time in the history of speleology, we crossed the 2-kilometer line - 2080 m.
You can get into the cave only as part of one of the speleological expeditions, and even then only if you have the appropriate climbing skills and special speleological equipment.
In 2005, as part of the next expedition of the UkrSA, hydraulic leveling was carried out to clarify the depth of the cave. A series of subsequent expeditions by rival teams Cavex and UCA dived in bottom siphons, increasing the depth of the cave several times.
At the moment, the cave has been explored to a depth of 2197 meters. The current record belongs to the speleologist Gennady Samokhin.
There are still unexplored branches in the Krubera-Voronya cave. Whether they will lead to new records or to a dead end is still unknown.
Exploration of the cave continues to this day.