Addergoole Titanic Monument

When the RMS Titanic sank in the icy Atlantic ocean on 15 April 1912, some 1,517 people died. Many were from London, New York or other cosmopolitan cities, but the loss was felt particularly hard by a Parish in a tiny village in Ireland.

Fourteen of the residents of the tiny village of Lahardane (pop 500) in Mayo, Ireland -- and two crew members, who were originally from Lahardane for a total of sixteen -- sailed on the Titanic in April 1912. When she sank only 3 of the 14 from Lahardane survived, making this the single most disastrous place associated with the Titanic Story. It could have been even worse, as two more women from Lahardane were scheduled to board the ship, but did not.

The disaster created a cascade of tragedy. When one of the crew members little brothers who was serving in the army at the time, heard of his brothers death aboard the Titanic he promptly committed suicide.

Today the St Patrick's Church in Lahardane has a plaque commemorating the disaster and on 9th April 2012, there will be a "Travel "Titanic Memorial Cruise," the 100th anniversary of the disaster.

Lava River Cave

The Lava River Cave, located 12 miles (19 kilometer) south of Bend on the east side of Highway 97 and part of the Newberry National Volcanic Monument, is a prime example of a lava tube. Measuring in at 5,211 feet (1,588 m) in length, the northwestern section of the cave is the longest continuous lava tube in the state of Oregon.

Although the official discovery of the cave was credited to a pioneer hunter back in 1889, archaeologists have found the presence of obsidian flakes near the cave and believe that Native Americans knew about the cave long before settlers ever arrived in central Oregon.

80,000 years ago a volcanic eruption formed the Lava River Cave. The volcanic flow that formed the cave also underlies much of the Bend area, and even almost reaches Redmond, Oregon. The Lava River Cave itself was created by lava flowing from a volcanic vent that flowed northwest from the vent toward the Deschutes River.

Mother Shipton's Cave and the Petrifying Well

Mother Shipton was said to be a witch and an oracle, predicting doomsday horrors and disasters that were to befall the Tudor reign, each morbid forecast recited in prose. Allegedly born as Ursula Southhell in a cave in the forests of Knaresborough, she was associated with all kinds of tragic events and dark doings in the area, including the bewitchment of a nearby well that turned objects into stone.

“The world to an end shall come
In eighteen hundred and eighty one.”

-Mother Shipton

Taking the post-humous credit and blame for many strange happenings throughout
the UK, Australia and the U.S. throughout the 17th, 18th, and even the 19th centuries, Mother Shipton left quite a legacy. Besides several published editions of her prophecies, her name graces pubs and her effigy and statues are used by fortune tellers. A moth whose wings appear to bear the image of a hags face was named after her, and a caricature of her is believed to be the first adaptation of the British Pantomime dame.

One of the mystical secrets of the enigmatic Mother Shipton has been solved by modern science. The well nearby her dwelling that petrified objects left in its waters has been somewhat of a visitor's attraction since 1630, making it the oldest tourist spot in England. Once thought to be the work of witchcraft, it's now known that the water that can turn thing ike teddy bears, hats and other random items into “stone” within 3 to 5 months is due to the natural process of evaporation and an unusually high mineral content.

Mother Shipton's Cave and Petrifying Well now has a gift shop, a picnic area, a wishing well, and of course a walk along the river to see the items, eerily consisting mostly of children's toys, hung beneath the soothsayer's petrifying waters.

Vortex Spring

Freshwater and Florida isn't always a combination that conjures good feelings among the locals. More often than not, Floridians identify freshwater with swampland, mosquitos, snakes and alligators – not to mention the general air of unfavorable comparisons to the miles of sandy beaches nearby.

Vortex Spring is an exception. Steadily fed by the cool water of an underground river, the spring is a refreshing oasis in the middle of the Florida panhandle. Unlike lakes that can stagnate (and become the perfect home for certain reptilian creatures that are as deadly as they are lazy), the constant flow of water keeps Vortex Spring clear, cool and generally pristine.

That goes double for the vast underwater cavern that truly makes this spring special. Extending more than 1,600 feet (that have been measured so far) into the limestone bedrock, Vortex Spring conceals one of the largest known underground caves in the southern United States – a fact that has not been overlooked by cave divers around the world.

Professional cave divers travel for miles to experience the cavern, which offers a more hospitable environment than most due to the fresh and always-flowing water. Comparable dive sites are often found in much harsher, bacteria-ridden saltwater locations, or in the icy depths of glaciers. For this reason, Vortex Spring has become a popular dive training facility, offering classes and unique opportunities to novices and professionals alike.

The cavern begins just 58 feet below the water's surface, but extends far beyond that. Experienced cave divers are allowed to travel to a depth of 115 feet (though the cave is technically open to a depth of 310 feet, at which point it is barricaded for safety). Professional exploration expeditions have mapped the cave to the aforementioned 1,642 feet, but the cave likely goes even deeper, and may not be fully measured for quite some time, if ever.

Coconino Lava River Cave

Lava does weird things. When it flows from a volcano or some other fiery leak in the earth's crust, its surface cools and hardens in the open air, but a viscous molten core continues to flow beneath and through that outer shell. This leads to the formation of fascinating geological phenomena like rippling lava fields, artistic lava spirals and decorative lava ropes.

Of all these intriguing curiosities, most interesting for adventurers is surely the lava tube — long, cavelike passages underground, arching in a near-perfect circle so ideal for traveling through, one might think they were man-made. These caves were formed millennia ago as the outside of a giant lava flow hardened, but a still-liquid center traveled through it like an underground river. Until the river stopped, leaving behind a circular tube unlike any other naturally-formed subterranean cave.

One such tube is the Coconino Lava River Cave in the Coconino National Forest, near Flagstaff, Arizona. The cave is massive – big enough for a person to walk through with dozens of feet overhead – and features the striking, telltale circumference of a lava tube. Spelunkers won't find stalactites or stalagmites decorating this hall of echoes – just the smooth arch formed by liquid-hot rock as it traveled through.

The unexpectedly smooth surface area can actually be hazardous, as the difference in temperature between the cool subterranean cave and the hot desert above ground is so great, condensation often forms and makes the walls and floors of the Lava River Cave very slick.

Coconino's Lava River Cave isn't the only lava river cave in the world, nor is it the largest even though it stretches for more than a mile through solid rock. But one extremely notable feature that continues to fascinate visitors and geologists alike is the unique "Y-intersection" deep within the tunnel, at which two massive tubes combine into one, creating a unique Y-shape out of three identical tubes. This leads to a dizzying mirror effect that can sometimes be disorienting to inexperienced explorers.

The cave is very close to the surface aboveground, with holes punctuating the ceiling at times, creating a surface treacherous for walking above the cave, but providing beautiful pillars of light from outside while traveling within it. This makes the Lava River Cave one of the most beautiful subterranean sites in the western United States.

Chilzina and the Forty Steps of Kandahar

Sometimes, simplicity speaks volumes. A short tower can seem imposing on a featureless plain. A tiny word can say a lot if it's on a blank wall. And 40 simple steps can tell a complex story of perseverance and dominance, if they're carved into the mountainside leading to its peak.

That's the scene at Chilzina, otherwise known as the "Forty Steps of Kandahar." Carved into a mountain peak at the western boundary of what was "Old Kandahar" (conveniently located in the same place as the current Kandahar), this monument was an imposing symbol etched upon the natural defense formed by Kandahar's western mountains. And the man who put them there knew exactly what he was doing.

Babur was the first emperor of the Mughal Empire, and he did not come by that title lightly. He literally bent the world before him to his will, conquering much of central Asia and the Indian subcontinent to form his empire and expand the influence of his Persian culture. A descendant of both Timur and Ghenghis Khan, Babur wanted people to know his name as well.

Thus at Chilzina, he carved a staircase into a mountain and hollowed out an enclave for recording his history. Into the wall of that enclave, Babur carved the story of his conquests in the Mughal Empire in Persian for all to see. He then carved statues of two lions, chained, at the top of the stairs, guarding the entrance to the enclave.

While the staircase is impressive indeed and the inscription is the point of it all, the lions remain the best example of his legacy. Because they were chained, even these guardians, shaped purposefully and painstakingly out of bare stone, signified his power and control over them, there at his service, just as he saw the world around him.

Lechuguilla Cave

Until 1986, Lechuguilla Cave was just a dead-end historical site used briefly for bat guano mining and intermittently visited by enthusiastic cavers. In the 1950’s however, light was shed on this landmark's true potential when cavers realized they could hear wind from underneath the cave floor, and concluded that beneath the rubble was a series of passages. In 1984, a group of Colorado cavers were granted permission by the National Park Service to begin digging.
Two years later in May of 1986, large walking passages were uncovered.

A total of 120 miles of passages have since been discovered, and explorers have pushed the depth of the cave to 1,604 feet, making Lechuguilla the deepest limestone cave in the country, the fifth longest cave in the world, and third longest in the United States. The unexplored passages and novel beauty attract cavers from all over the world. The cave's entrance is adorned with large amounts of gypsum and lemon-yellow sulfur deposits. The wide variety of rare speleothems of Lechuguilla Cave surpasses its sister, Carlsbad Cavern, though Carlsbad’s Big Room is still the largest room between the two caves.

Scientists have five separate geological formations to explore in this Guadaplupe Mountain cave. Studies show that the speleogenesis, or cave formation, came from sulfuric acid dissolution. The sulfuric acid is presumably derived from hydrogen sulfide which migrated from nearby oil deposits, thus it appears that the cave was formed from the bottom up, in contrast to the top-down carbonic acid dissolution mechanism of cave formation.

Other discoveries include the rare chemolithoautotrophic bacteria, which are believed to feed on sulfur, iron, and manganese minerals and assist in determining the cave’s massive size and variety of speleothems, and the “extremophile” microbes that may have medicinal qualities used for human benefit.

BBC’s Planet Earth showcased Lechuguilla Cave’s Chandelier Ballroom in its “Caves” episode. It took them two years to get permission to film in the cave, and it’s unlikely another film crew will be allowed to enter anytime in the near future. At this time, only approved scientific researchers and survey and exploration teams have access to the cave.

Dungeon Rock

In the 2,200-acre Lynn Woods Reservation in Lynn, MA, is a rock formation called Dungeon Rock. It features a cave dug by a man directed by ghosts to search for a pirate treasure. The story starts in the mid-1600s, when a pirate named Thomas Veale supposedly hid in a cave with his loot. He lived there for a while until an earthquake destroyed him and the cave. The formation became known as Pirate’s Dungeon, which over the years became Dungeon Rock.

In 1852, a man named Hiram Marble bought it, erected a house and outbuildings, moved his wife and son to the spot, and then excavated a new cave to find the treasure. Marble was a spiritualist and believed he was receiving directions to the treasure from the ghost of Thomas Veale himself. He held séances to receive digging directions, which he and his son Edwin undertook with dynamite and tools. They dug until their deaths but never found the treasure.

Today, the cave they dug still exists and features an iron door open for a few hours each day during the warmer seasons or upon request from the local park rangers. To get to it, just follow the signs in the park. It’s set on a hill, and is accessible by a path. The rock itself is either two giant rocks abutting each other or a single rock with a giant crevice splitting it in two. The door is set inside that crevice. The cave is dark, wet, cold and a flashlight is needed to explore it. Thin wooden steps lead to the cavern floor, which then wends an erratic 135 feet into the rock before becoming too small to stand up in and ending in a small pool of stagnant water.

Some remnants of Marble’s buildings still exist around the rock, including a couple of cellar holes and a fragment of wall. Near that fragment of wall is a large pink rock that marks the grave of Edwin Marble. Hiram is buried at Bay Path Cemetery in Charlton, MA.

Tham Sakkarin Savanna kuha

The Tham Sakkarin Savannakuha is an abandoned limestone cave founded in 1889 that holds the Wat Tham Xieng Maen, where local worshipers used to pay homage and cleanse Buddha images. Nowadays only the remains of these torched and decayed images remain.

The mouth of the cave is outlined by a large stone block entrance accompanied by plumeria trees and two large ruined spirit houses, which were once a shelter of the cave’s spirits. The iron gate at the entrance is locked, but if you inquire with the monks at the nearby monastery, Wat Long Khun, they will unlock it for you and you can walk through the long, dark, damp cave. A flashlight is highly recommended.

Köw Ata Underground Lake

In landlocked countries, finding a place to swim can often be a challenge. This is especially true for places like Turkmenistan, a sun scorched Central Asian country, of which over 80% of the land is covered in desert. The country has access to the Caspian Sea, the world’s largest lake, but since it is a long way from the capital city Ashgabat, most people from the capital region prefer the country’s next best swimming spot – which is located over 200 ft. underground.

A long metal staircase leads down into the Bakharden Cave, in which the 235 ft. long lake is located. The 35°C warm waters contain a high amount of different salts and minerals, most notably sulfur, which is responsible for the distinct smell within the cave. Thus, Köw Ata Underground Lake is also the closest thing Turkmenistan comes to a thermal spa.

Aside from being a swimming spot and a thermal spa, the cave is also a natural monument, established to protect the largest known colony of bats in the whole of Central Asia. It is a question of personal taste, whether this fact adds to the swimming pleasure or not.

Kyrk Gyz Cave

In the Köytendag Mountains, a dirt trail leads to the remote Kyrk Gyz Cave. Inside the cave is a something which looks familiar but slowly reveals itself to be bizarre.

The ceilings of the cavern is bedecked with a large number of stalactites. However on closer inspection, one can see the stalactites are not stone, but cloth. Local legend has it that anyone who can fling a mud pie with a cloth attached to it to the ceiling of the cave and make it stick, walks away with a wish granted.

Kyrk Gyz Cave means "Forty Girls’ Cave", a name that refers to a local legend of forty girls who once retreated there, in order to avoid rape and murder by bandits. Once in the cave, the forty girls were fed by a mysterious old woman, whose tomb is said to be located in front of the cave. When the bandits discovered them, the Girls prayed to the Gods, who showed them an escape route through the caverns. What that story has to do with placing mud-soaked cloth stripes to the ceiling of the cave however, remains unclear.

Marble Caves of Chile Chico

The Marble Caves, or Cuevas de Mármol, are one of the most exhilarating and stunning caves to be found anywhere in the world.

The caves, made entirely of marble, were formed when water penetrated the huge blocks of rock and carved them in such a way that they formed beautiful caves and tunnels within the rocks.

Tourists can take a boat ride through the inner tunnels with a local tour company.

Nettle Cave Tour in Klingon

The Jenolan Caves of New South Wales are Australia's most visited caves. With up to 200,000 visitors a year, people are boldly going where many have gone before. Just to make sure their bases are covered, they offer self guided tours in 13 languages - and just to make sure their bases are REALLY covered, they offer tours of one of their caves in the debatably fictional language of Klingon.

The Star Trek aliens are a humanoid warrior race and have one of the most fully developed fabricated languages. With thousands of speakers worldwide there's a translation of Hamlet into Klingon and even a Klingon Language Institute with registered members, about 2500 of them.

Star Trek started the relationship with the caves, naming one of the starships in Star Trek: The Next Generation the “USS Jenolan.” While looking at new languages for the self guided tours, it was decided to put Klingon down and pay tribute back to the show. They brought in Klingon scholars and announced the tours at an Australian sci-fi convention in 2010.

Nettle Cave is the most visited caves in Australia that is open for casual exploration, where digital self-guided tours lead visitors around the ancient hole in the ground. Nettle Cave offers a variety of interesting sites, including Sooty Owls and stromatolites (structures made of sediment and cyanobacteria). The Jenolan Caves are some of the oldest caves in the world, estimated at 340 million years and have over 40 kM of underground passageways. While some of it is still being explored, there's currently no intelligent life down there.

Eisriesenwelt

Near Salzburg, Austria, the home of the real life Von Trapp family, another kind of spectacle emerged thousands of years ago. Eisriesenwelt, an ice cave literally dubbed “The World of the Ice Giants” in German, can be found beneath the Hochkogel Mountain, in Styria, about 70 kilometers from Salzburg.

Eisriesenwelt is the largest of the world’s ice caves, an unusual phenomenon created when ice forms beneath already-created lava or limestone caves underneath the ground. Often confused for one another, glacier caves are formed within ice, while ice caves are formed within stone structures.

Despite its freezing temperatures, Eisriesenwelt was thought to be the entrance to hell according to Austrian lore. Because of its creepy reputation, Austrians didn’t explore the cave until Anton Posselt traversed its icy depths in 1879. The cave started gaining popularity with tourists in the 1920’s, when the first paths up the mountain to the caves were built.

Today, Eisriesenwelt is relatively throughout the world and only hosts around 200,000 visitors each year. Even those who are able to visit the enormous cave only get to see a fraction of it—about one kilometer of the cave’s total 40 kilometers. To visit the cave, visitors take a cable car up to the Oedl Haus, a traditional mountain hut built for the first influx of visitors in the ‘20s.

Neptune's Grotto

In the 18th century, a local fisherman from Sardinia spotted an opening in a cliff side while fishing off the coast. The opening, which is generally a meter above sea level unless waters are rough, turned out to be a beautiful grotto featuring an abundance of giant stalactites and stalagmites. Named after the Roman god of the sea, the local legend has since become a tourist attraction.

Within the grotto tourists can visit a 120-meter long saltwater lake. The shallow salt lake boasts the same calcic salt structures as the rest of the cave.

The entrance to the cave is accessible by boat when waters are calm, or by car. Those driving to the site park atop the cliff and then climb down steps that were made in 1954 known as "escala del cabirol," or goat steps. The passageways within the cliffs are approximately two and a half miles long, although only the first few hundred meters are open to the public.

Meramec Caverns

For 400 million years, the Meramec Caverns have been in existence deep in the Ozarks. The caves began forming when water percolating through the bedrock of the Ozark hills began to dissolve the stone, and created the underground passages. Eventually the underground river carved some 18 miles of passageways and chambers, which the seeping water festooned liberally with speleothems--the stalactites and stalagmites that decorate the caverns floor and ceiling.

The 4.6-mile cavern system holds its place in history as a shelter for Pre-Columbian Native Americans, the first cave west of the Mississippi to be explored by Europeans, a saltpeter plant for the Union Army during the Civil War, and a hideout for the notorious outlaw Jesse James.

The caves are now a tourist attraction along former Route 66, and receives around 150,000 visitors every year.

SubTropolis

There are a number of advantages to keeping things underground. The temperature remains near constant; energy costs are lowered; and—in the massive, 55,000,000-square-foot space known as Subtropolis—there is a whole city of workers who can keep your goods safe.

Subtropolis stores everything from a USPS collection of millions of postal stamps and the original film reels of Gone With the Wind, to a series of artificially lighted, manmade habitats used by Earth Works to demonstrate science to students.

Mining in SubTropolis began in the 1940s, and the empty space grew under the limestone bluffs on the Missouri River. By 1960, the owners realized that they had an enormous area they could rent out for business operations. The dubbed their underground city "SubTropolis" and called it "the World's Largest Underground Business Complex," a phrase that Hunt Midwest has trademarked. SubTropolis sports nearly seven miles of illuminated paved roads, and semi-trucks drive throughout the underground.

“We load and unload our trucks in perfect weather conditions,” said Joe Paris, co-founder and principal of Paris Brothers a national specialty foods company headquartered in SubTropolis. “It’s truly a green environment. We’re probably using about 75 percent less electricity underground than we would in an above-ground facility. Whether it’s electronics or whether it’s food, you don’t have temperature and humidity fluctuations and so you don’t have any condensation, moisture building up in anything. From that standpoint, in my opinion you can’t beat it.

Krubera Cave

Since Jules Verne wrote his influential novel “Journey to the Center of the Earth“, the aim to discover the deepest place below surface has sparked the imaginations of generations of explorers, adventurers and scientists. Those in search of the deepest known cave on the planet are always lead to Georgia’s breakaway region of Abkhazia. Deep in the mountains of the Arabika massif, this record-breaking cave can be found - it is the Krubera Cave, also known as Voronya Cave, just to keep it interesting.

The Arabika massif in the Western Caucasus constitutes one of the largest karst massifs on Earth, but despite its enormous potential to scientists, the area, including Krubera Cave, has been woefully under-explored. One of the reasons is the remoteness of the area, which is only accessible for up to four months a year, but the main obstacle for scientists have been the numerous political conflicts in Abkhazia, which continue until today.

Krubera Cave became the world’s deepest cave in 2001, when Ukrainian speleogolists reached a depth of 1710m, thereby exceeding the previous known reigning champion in the Austrian Alps. At a depth of 1500m a subterranean waterfall of near-freezing water has flooded a branch of the cave system, while the main branch continues to a depth of 2140m, where a terminal siphon marks the end of the cave.

The Ukrainian speleogolists needed a staggering 14 days to reach the siphon at the end of the cave. A number of endemic fauna has been found at all levels of depth within the cave, including spiders, scorpions, beetles, as well as stygofauna like shrimps and amphipods.

Stone Mushrooms of Beli Plast

If you secure a person to the ground and surround them with a pool of water that comes up to just below their chin, leaving only their head above the surface, they're bound to become nervous.

If you do the same to a rock, it becomes one of the more unique and whimsical rock formations you'll ever see. Of course, it takes hundreds of years of erosion for that process to be complete, but the results are fairly typical: mushrooms. Gigantic, freestanding pillars in the distinct shape of mushrooms.

Commonly called table rocks in the West, formations like the aptly named Turnip Rock in Michigan or Jug Rock in Indiana bear a distinct resemblance to mushrooms.

But the stone mushrooms in Beli Plast, Bulgaria are unique, and the reason is simple: mushrooms. Plural. As in, entire clumps of massive stone pillars grouped together just like mushrooms in the wild. They are formed just the way table rocks are formed: eroded into shape over years and years, as the water that once nearly submerged them lapped against their walls. And then eroded some more by the wind long after the water had receded for good.

Unlike most table rocks, the formation at Beli Plast is no single monolith sticking out like a literal sore thumb. These pillars that used to form a lake bed are cute, quaint and suspiciously close in shape and color to actual mushrooms, several of them together yet independent and each reaching several meters high and weighing hundreds of pounds.

Under the surface of any number of lakes and rivers, this is how many boulders, rocks and shorelines appear. But it's rare that you find them, still in tact, in a desert area where water no longer collects. That, along with their counterintuitive shape, is what makes this collection of natural sculptures so interesting.

Cueva Ventana

Cueva Ventana, or "Window Cave", is a locally famous limestone cliff cave that visitors can freely explore. The cave offers impressive stalagmites and stalactites, but the real highlight comes at the cave's end which dramtically frames the lush Río Grande de Arecibo valley. Visitors should also not miss the shorter, though more challenging, (unnamed?) cave across from Cueva Ventana's entrance.