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The Giant Crystal Cave of Naica
It’s 50oC and has a humidity of 100%, less than a couple of hundred people have been inside and it’s so deadly that even with respirators and suits of ice you can only survive for 20 minutes before your body starts to fail. It’s the nearest thing to visiting another planet – it’s going deep inside our own.Where: Beneath the town of Naica in the Chihuahuan Desert, Mexico
Geological Features: The cave is also known as Cueva de los Cristales. It contains the largest natural crystals ever found, which are composed of selenite. The largest is 11 m (36 ft) in length, 4 m (13 ft) in diameter and 55 tons in weight.
How it was formed: Naica lies on an ancient fault and there is an underground magma chamber below the cave. The magma heated the ground water and it became saturated with minerals. The hollow space of the cave was filled with this mineral rich hot water and remained stable for about 500,000 years allowing crystals to form and grow to immense sizes.
“Cueva de los Cristales is the incarnation of our most awesome science fiction imaginations - Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Superman’s Fortress of Solitude. At about the same time as humans first ventured out of Africa, these crystals began to slowly grow. For half a million years they remained protected and nurtured by a womb of hot hydrothermal fluids rich with minerals.
When mining began here over a hundred years ago, the water table was lowered and the cave drained. The crystals seemingly interminable development was frozen forever leaving them as aborted relics of the deep earth. It wasn’t until 2001 that miners, searching for lead, eventually penetrated the cave wall and brought it to light. The very act of discovering and witnessing them has triggered their slow decay and now no one knows what their fate will be. They are a testament to the hidden forces of the planet, forces which operate on scales far beyond our own.”
Who knows what other wonders lie hidden deep inside the earth.
(via bromine)
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