A new cave system in Crimea
A new cave system named “Eastern Stream” was found in May 2013 in the south-eastern part of Dolgorukovskaya plateau in Crimea by a local mountaineering and caving club. In the upper part of the cave they found a weak but constant water stream. They required a year to overcome several narrow places. Currently, the cave has a length 1.5-2 km, depth 150-170m, but only 300m of passages have been surveyed. There are several unexplored tributaries. Water volume at the end of the explored part of the cave is 1l/sec, where 2 siphons are the last obstacle. One siphon is “hanging”, so there is a possibility to drain the water from it. The other has a narrow draughting crack above it.
The large and famous Krasnaya cave system http://worldwalk.info/en/catalog/913/ is also located on Dolgorukovskaya and until now all underground streams on this plateau proved to be tributaries to Krasnaya. This is the first cave with a constant water stream which is a separate karst system.
The spring Krestoviy and the cave Kara-coba (in a bed of the river Burulcha) are at the downstream end of the new cave system. The volume of water resurging is 1.5 times that of the Krasnaya cave river. In the upper part of this new system are caves Partisanskaya (length 300m, depth 50m), Arochnaya and several shafts. The distance from the new cave system entrance to the spring Krestodyi is about 4 km. For a comparison: the distance from the entrance to the end of Krasnaya cave system is 4.5 km, while the surveyed length of passages is 25 km.
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Active cavers are invited to take part in the exploration of this new cave system “Eastern Stream”.
Contact Gennadii Samokhin gen-samokhin@yandex.ru
A new cave system in Crimea
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