5 jaw-dropping caves - superman's fortress, santa's grotto & the chandelier ballroom

Here's my top 5 caves as seen on the BBC.


1. Superman's Fortress - The Giant Crystal Cave of Naica  

Appeared in: BBC How Earth Made Us (2010)

Probably the most incredible photograph of the cave ever taken. Photograph by Carsten Peter/Speleoresearch & Films. Published in National Geographic.

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. 

I visited these caves in 2009, this is what I wrote at the time:

"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. To me they are a testament to the hidden forces of the planet, forces which operate on scales far beyond our own." More images from my blog entry of 2009

2. Santa's Grotto - The Frozen Ice Caves of Mount Erebus

Appeared in: BBC Frozen Planet (2011)

Where: Ross Island, Antartica, beneath Mount Erebus, the worlds southernmost active volcano

Name: Mount Erebus was discovered on January 27, 1841 by polar explorer Sir James Clark Ross who named it after his ships, Erebus and Terror. Erebus was a primordial Greek god of darkness, the son of Chaos. 

How it was formed: The volcano constantly releases hot gases which steam up through cracks and fractures in the volcanic rocks. As soon as this gas hits the frigid Antarctic air it freezes, and over time has created an intricate network of delicate ice caves and hollow towers, some as tall as 30 feet.

Mount Erebus, Ice Caves - George Steinmetz Source

3. The Chandelier Ballroom of Lechuguilla Caves 

Appeared in: BBC Planet Earth (2006)

Where: Carlsbad Caverns National Park, New Mexico, USA

Name: The cave is named for Agave lechuguilla, a plant found near its entrance.

Geological Features: Lechuguilla Cave is the sixth longest cave (130.24 miles / 210 km) known to exist in the world. It has a large variety of wonderfully named speleothems, including 20 feet (6.1m) gypsum chandeliers, 20 feet (6.1m) gypsum hairs and beards, 15 feet (4.6m) soda straws, hydromagnesite balloons, cave pearls, subaqueous helictites, rusticles, U-loops and J-loops.  

It took the Planet Earth team 2 years to gain permission to film this fragile cave system. An 8-hour journey through narrow passages ending in an abseil of 60 metres in utter darkness made getting equipment in hard, especially the small jib arm vital to the filming. The crew spent 10 days underground to get these first ever high-definition images of the caves.

Crystals in the Chandelier Ballroom Image Source

4. Waitomo - The Glow Worm Cave

Appeared in: BBC Life in the Undergrowth (2005)

Where: Waitomo, southern Waikato region of the North Island of New Zealand

Name:  The word Waitomo comes from the Māori language wai meaning water and tomo meaning a doline or sinkhole; it can thus be translated as 'water passing through a hole'.

There are around 300 caves in Waitomo, but it's not the geological formations that make these into a subterranean wonderland, it's the larvae of their resident glow worm - Arachnocampa luminosa, a species unique to New Zealand. Like a starry sky thousands of these tiny creatures radiate their unmistakable luminescent light. This attracts midges, moths and mosquitos who soon find themselves tangled in sticky strands that dangle from the larvae like fishing lines. The larva hoists up its catch and feeds.

Image Source



5. The Dongzhong Cave School

Appeared in: BBC Wild China (2008)

Where: Dongzhong cave school, Miao village, Ziyun county, China.

Name: Dongzhong means 'in cave'

The Dongzhong cave was formed by wind and water erosion over thousands of years. Now two hundred pupils, 18 families and their livestock live here.

Photo: Rueters

Not for the faint-hearted: China's Killer Zoos

This report won the Wildscreen 2008 News award.
The judges stated that this was a report everyone should see.

Please be aware that this contains footage of a disturbing nature.

by Samantha Dixon

Giant panda sex secrets revealed

The giant panda's courtship and mating sequence - from boisterous beginning to noisy ending - has been filmed in the wild for what may be a TV first. A BBC Natural History team recorded the magic moments deep in the bamboo forest that lines China's Qinling mountains. "I liken it to Chewbaccas in a pub brawl," explained Gavin Maxwell, the producer of Wild China. This is not the first time panda sex has been filmed in the wild, but it is thought to be one of the most complete courtship sequences ever caught on camera. Mr Maxwell described the venture as an eye-opener - to see pandas in a context that is far removed from the shy, placid reputation we traditionally associate with the animals. "Occasionally, you will be sitting there quietly trying to keep in the background and the males will suddenly come charging out of the bamboo towards you," he explained. Wild China is the BBC's first ever co-production with Chinese state television. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7438975

Wild China: Heart of the Dragon

Wild China, BBC Two, Sun, 8.05pm

Sunday 11 May, 8.05pm rpt Saturday 17 May, 7.00pm

The improbable egg-carton hills of Southern China seem to float in a sea of glistening rice paddies. This is a landscape full of surprises. Next to peasants ploughing with buffaloes are rivers concealing dwarf alligators and giant salamanders, trained cormorants that catch fish for their masters, bats with unusual tastes and monkeys that hide in caves.

But this isn't a nature park. Almost 300 million people live here, with a tradition of eating wildlife. So what forces have shaped this remarkable landscape and how do farmers and wild creatures manage to coexist among the rocks and the rice fields?

Wild China, the BBC's new nature series, captures a vanishing world

Given the global meanderings of Attenborough and his ilk, you would imagine that there can be few parts of the planet that haven't heard the gentle footfalls of a BBC Natural History Unit camera crew. BBC Bristol, where the production arm is based, must be awash with indecipherable expenses claims picked up everywhere from the Atacama desert to the Tora Bora caves.

But there is one significant area that remains, if not entirely unvisited, then under-explored: rural China, with its remarkably diverse habitats, wildlife and lifestyles. As the BBC's stunningly shot new six-part series Wild China demonstrates, there's much about a life working in, say, the rice paddies of the Yangtze River flood plain, that hasn't changed for hundreds of years. In the wake of China's extraordinary economic expansion, however, these are landscapes likely to change rapidly over the next generation. Experts forecast that, across the next two decades, some 300 million rural Chinese will migrate to the cities in search of better-paid jobs. And all this will have a huge impact, not just on already endangered species such as the South China tiger, but also on many of the rural traditions (such as hunting with golden eagles) that Wild China features.

The attraction of capturing what may well be a fast-disappearing world certainly helped to carry the series producer, Phil Chapman, though the inevitable problems associated with shooting in an environment traditionally suspicious of foreign film crews. “China isn't yet as accessible as many other countries, so it was difficult. The local politics of filming on location there can be very complicated. But by collaborating with China Central Television, an officially sanctioned production company, we got privileged access to many of the country's most remote areas.”

Each programme looks at a different geographical area, and the Wild China team wasn't always sure what they'd find on their travels. “The sub-tropical south is a poor, and poorly researched, area, so getting precise information about what could be filmed, where and when, wasn't easy,” Chapman says. Eventually they fetched up in a remote area of Guizhou Province. “We were taken to Zhongdong cave, where it transpired we were to be lodged. Arriving as dusk fell, we were led under a wide arch beneath a huge cliff to find an entire village of 18 families housed inside the cave, including a school with six classes, plus a menagerie of cows, goats, pigs and chickens.”

Some of Chapman's most vivid memories are of the “remarkable” people he met - not the powerbrokers encountered at the many formal banquets he attended to ease the wheels of the series' production, but the characters encountered out in the provinces. People such as the rice-farming Song family, “who welcomed us into their wooden home, where swallows are encouraged to build nests in the living room”, and three cormorant fishermen on the Li River: “Mr Huang, Mr Huang, and Mr Huang.”

But it's the animals that are the show-stoppers. “Some sequences, such as images of Chiru antelopes filmed in temperatures of -30C in Tibet's Chang Tang Reserve, and male pandas scrapping over a fertile female in the Qinling Mountains, are probably genuine ‘firsts',” Chapman suggests. Other footage required specialist equipment, such as the infra-red cameras that captured a colony of bumblebee-sized bats living inside a hollow bamboo stem.

Sometimes, of course, Chapman and his team had to rely solely on that vital weapon in the armoury of the natural history film-maker - infinite patience. “Red pandas are shy, rare creatures which live in dense mountain forests and spend a lot of time in the treetops. A key to our success in filming them were the Chinese scientists, who suggested we try an area, at a more accessible altitude, where they'd been spotted during the winter. But, even so, we were able to observe them only fleetingly.”

There's a hint of regret in Chapman's voice here, and maybe even a sense of a little bit of unfinished business. Whether he will ever return to China, he is unsure. And with the Chinese economy set to become the world's largest in a couple of years, quite what the Chapmans of the future will find out in the wilds of this vast, beautiful, complex and challenging country is anyone's guess.

Chris Riley, The Times

Wild China: Coming Soon

Wild China will be going out on BBC2 - Sunday, May 11th at 9pm.

This promises to be an eye opening insight into the large and enchanting land. I've seen the first programme and it really blew me away. The style felt fresh, a blend of obs docs and traditional blue chip, flowing melodically to take you on journey through the diverse landscapes of China. It kept me completely enthralled and captivated through the whole 50minutes - I never looked at my watch once.

This is a land of unbelievable natural complexity from the glittering peaks of the Himalayas to the barren steppe, the sub-Arctic to the tropical islands, through deserts both searingly hot and mind-numbingly cold and see, in pioneering images, a dazzling array of mysterious, beautiful, wild and rare creatures.

I can't wait to see the rest of the series.

P1 - Heart of the Dragon (produced by Phil Chapman) -Sunday 11th May
an introduction to the diversity of China's natural history

P2 - Shang-ri La (produced by Kathryn Jeffs) - Sunday 18th May
Yunnan province harbours bizarre creatures such as dwarf alligators and giant salamanders

P3 - Tibet (produced by Gavin Maxwell) - Sunday 25th May
life at the extremes in the high Himalayas and on the Tibetan plateau

P4 - Beyond the Great Wall (produced by George Chan) - Sunday 1st June
The eastern part of China's vast interior is the beating heart of the country

P5 - Land of the Panda (produced by Gavin Maxwell) - Sunday 8th June
the bamboo forests and hills of central China, home to the giant panda

P6 - Tides of Change (produced by Charlotte Scott) - Sunday 15th June
wildlife along the shores of the South China Sea must share their world with 600 million people

It has been mentioned by the schedulers that the time may change to 8pm so keep an eye out in the tv guides but hopefully it will stay at 9pm.