Lechuguilla Cave and the World Below the World

In nineteen eighty-six, a group of cavers digging through breakdown at the bottom of a bat guano pit called Misery Hole broke through into a passage that opened into a cave system that nobody knew was there. The cave they had found, beneath the cave already designated as a national park, would eventually be mapped to more than one hundred and fifty miles of passage, making it one of the ten longest known caves in the world and one of the deepest in the United States at nearly one thousand six hundred feet.

They named it Lechuguilla, after the agave plant that grows at the desert entrance.

Lechuguilla is not accessible to the general public. Access requires a research permit and is restricted to scientific and survey teams. The reason is the cave's extraordinary fragility and, more significantly, its scientific value: Lechuguilla has been sealed from the surface for at least four million years, possibly much longer. The microorganisms living in its waters and on its walls have evolved in complete isolation from the surface world. Researchers studying those organisms have found strains that resist many modern antibiotics. The cave is a biological archive that no other environment replicates.

The formations inside are among the most unusual in any documented cave system. Gypsum chandeliers hang from the ceilings, some of them curving upward in defiance of gravity, a formation produced by sulfuric acid dissolving limestone from below rather than the rainwater-dissolution process that shapes most caves. The cave was not carved by a river. It was dissolved from below.

The discovery in nineteen eighty-six added a dimension to Carlsbad Caverns National Park that the park's founders did not know existed. The park is sitting on top of something it cannot fully explain, which is, the scientists who work there will tell you, an unusually honest position for a national park to occupy.