So how many of you have ever been in a cave before? Okay, a few of you. When you think of a cave, most of you think of a tunnel going through solid rock, and in fact, that's how most caves are. Around this half of the country, most of your caves are made of limestone. Back where I'm from, most of our caves are made of lava rock, because we have a lot of volcanoes out there. But the caves I want to share with you today are made completely of ice, specifically glacier ice that's formed in the side of the tallest mountain in the state of Oregon, called Mount Hood.
Koliko vas je nekada bilo u nekoj pećini? Znači nekoliko vas. Kada pomislite na pećinu, većina vas će zamisliti tunel u kamenu, a takva i jeste većina. U ovoj polovini zemlje većina pećina je krečnjačka. Tamo odakle sam ja, većina pećina je od skamenjene lave jer imamo puno vulkana. Pećine koje danas želim da vam pokažem su u potpunosti od leda, tačnije glečera koji se formiraju na jednoj padini najviše planine u američkoj državi Oregon, koja se zove Hud.
Now Mount Hood's only one hour's drive from Portland, the largest city in Oregon, where over two million people live. Now the most exciting thing for a cave explorer is to find a new cave and be the first human to ever go into it. The second most exciting thing for a cave explorer is to be the first one to make a map of a cave. Now these days, with so many people hiking around, it's pretty hard to find a new cave, so you can imagine how excited we were to find three new caves within sight of Oregon's largest city and realize that they had never been explored or mapped before. It was kind of like being an astronaut, because we were getting to see things and go places that no one had ever seen or gone to before.
Ta planina je na samo sat vremena vožnje od Portlanda, najvećeg grada u Oregonu, u kome živi dva miliona ljudi. Za svakog istraživača pećina najzanimljivije je kada se otkrije nova pećina i kada ste prva osoba koja u nju kroči. Druga stvar je da prvi napravite mapu pećine. U ovo vreme s puno planinara na sve strane vrlo je teško pronaći novu pećinu tako da možete zamisliti koliko smo bili uzbuđeni kada smo našli tri nove pećine na videlu najvećeg grada u Oregonu i shvatili da do sada nisu istraživane niti mapirane. Osećali smo se kao astronauti jer smo mogli da vidimo i posetimo mesta na koja niko nikad nije kročio.
So what is a glacier? Well, those of you who have ever seen or touched snow, you know that it's really light, because it's just a bunch of tiny ice crystals clumped together, and it's mostly air. If you squish a handful of snow to make a snowball, it gets really small, hard and dense. Well, on a mountain like Hood, where it snows over 20 feet a year, it crushes the air out of it and gradually forms it into hard blue ice. Now each year, more and more ice stacks up on top of it, and eventually it gets so heavy that it starts to slide down the mountain under its own weight, forming a slow-moving river of ice. When ice packed like that starts to move, we call it a glacier, and we give it a name. The name of the glacier these caves are formed in is the Sandy Glacier. Now each year, as new snow lands on the glacier, it melts in the summer sun, and it forms little rivers of water on the flow along the ice, and they start to melt and bore their way down through the glacier, forming big networks of caves, sometimes going all the way down to the underlying bedrock. Now the crazy thing about glacier caves is that each year, new tunnels form. Different waterfalls pop up or move around from place to place inside the cave. Warm water from the top of the ice is boring its way down, and warm air from below the mountain actually rises up, gets into the cave, and melts the ceilings back taller and taller. But the weirdest thing about glacier caves is that the entire cave is moving, because it's formed inside a block of ice the size of a small city that's slowly sliding down the mountain.
A šta je glečer? Ako ste ikad videli i osetili sneg znate da je veoma lagan, zato što se sastoji od mnoštva nagomilanih sitnih kristala i većinom vazduha. Ako stisnete sneg da napravite grudvu postaće manji, tvrđi i gušći. Na planini kao što je Hud, gde snežni pokrivač dostiže visinu do preko pola metra godišnje, sneg potiskuje vazduh i postepeno se formira tvrdi plavi led. Svake godine se sve više leda nagomilava dok na kraju ne oteža toliko da počne da klizi niz padinu od sopstvene težine. praveći reku leda koji se sporo kreće. Kada se pokrene tako zgrušan led, zovemo ga glečerom i damo mu ime. Ime glečera u kome su te pećine je glečer Sendi. Svake godine, kad novi sneg padne na glečer, on se topi pod letnjim suncem i u svom toku, pored leda, stvara i rečice i oni se zajedno tope i slivaju zajedno s glečerom, stvarajući velike mreže pećina, ponekad čak i do donjeg kamenitog sloja tla. Zanimljivo je to što se svake godine u glečerskim pećinama stvore novi tuneli. U pećini se pojave i različiti vodopadi koji mogu da se pomeraju s jednog mesta na drugo. Topla voda s površine leda probija put ka dole a topao vazduh ispod planine se penje gore, ulazi u pećinu i sve više topi tavanicu. Najčudnije je to što se glečerske pećine kreću zato što su unutar gromade leda, veličine omanjeg grada, koja polako klizi niz planinu.
Now this is Brent McGregor, my cave exploration partner. He and I have both been exploring caves a long time and we've been climbing mountains a long time, but neither one of us had ever really explored a glacier cave before. Back in 2011, Brent saw a YouTube video of a couple of hikers that stumbled across the entrance to one of these caves. There were no GPS coordinates for it, and all we knew was that it was somewhere out on the Sandy Glacier. So in July of that year, we went out on the glacier, and we found a big crack in the ice. We had to build snow and ice anchors so that we could tie off ropes and rappel down into the hole. This is me looking into the entrance crevasse. At the end of this hole, we found a huge tunnel going right up the mountain underneath thousands of tons of glacier ice. We followed this cave back for about a half mile until it came to an end, and then with the help of our survey tools we made a three-dimensional map of the cave on our way back out.
Ovo je Brent Makgregor, moj partner u istraživanju pećina. Obojica dugo istražujemo pećine i dugo se pentramo po planinama, ali dosad nismo istraživali nijednu glečersku pećinu. 2011. godine, Brent je video snimak na Jutjubu u kome su dva pešaka naišla na ulaz u jednu od ovih pećina. Nisu postojale GPS koordinate do nje i znali smo samo da je negde na glečeru Sendi. Jula iste godine otišli smo na taj glečer i našli smo veliku pukotinu u ledu. Morali smo da postavimo kuke u sneg i led kako bismo vezali konopce i spustili se u rupu. Ovde ja gledam ulaznu pukotinu. Na kraju te rupe smo našli ogroman tunel koji je vodio tačno u planinu, ispod hiljada tona glečerskog leda. Išli smo kroz pećinu skoro 800 metara do samog njenog kraja, a onda smo uz pomoć istraživačkog alata napravili trodimenzionalnu mapu pećine dok smo se vraćali nazad.
So how do you map a cave? Well, cave maps aren't like trail maps or road maps because they have pits and holes going to overlapping levels. To make a cave map, you have to set up survey stations every few feet inside the cave, and you use a laser to measure the distance between those stations. Then you use a compass and an inclinometer to measure the direction the cave is headed and measure the slope of the floor and the ceilings. Now those of you taking trigonometry, that particular type of math is very useful for making maps like this because it allows you to measure heights and distances without actually having to go there. In fact, the more I mapped and studied caves, the more useful I found all that math that I originally hated in school to be. So when you're done surveying, you take all this data and you punch it into a computer and you find someone that can draw really well, and you have them draft up a map that looks something like this, and it'll show you both a bird's-eye view of the passage as well as a profile view of the passage, kind of like an ant farm view. We named this cave Snow Dragon Cave because it was like a big dragon sleeping under the snow. Now later this summer, as more snow melted off the glacier, we found more caves, and we realized they were all connected.
Kako se pećina mapira? Mape pećina nisu kao pešačke staze ili putevi zato što ima raznih rupa koje se preklapaju na različitim nivoima. Za mapiranje pećine u njoj treba da se postave merne stanice na svakih pola metra pa se laserom meri razdaljina između svake. Potom se koriste kompas i inklinometar da se izmeri pravac u kome se pećina prostire i nagib poda i tavanice. Onima koji znaju trigonometriju ti podaci su vrlo korisni za pravljenje takvih mapa zato što mogu da se izmere visine i razdaljine bez odlaženja na samo mesto. Zapravo, što sam više mapirao i proučavao pećine to mi je korisnija bila trigonometrija koju sam prvo mrzeo u školi. Kada se završi s istraživanjem, svi ti podaci se smeste na računar i uz pomoć nekoga ko dobro crta sastavite skicu nalik na ovu, koja prikazuje prolaz iz ptičje perspektive kao i bočni presek prolaza, nalik na presek mravlje kolonije. Ovu pećinu smo nazvali Snežni zmaj jer je kao veliki zmaj koji spava pod snegom. Istog tog leta, kako se sneg na glečeru topio, našli smo još pećina i shvatili da su sve povezane.
Not long after we mapped Snow Dragon, Brent discovered this new cave not very far away. The inside of it was coated with ice, so we had to wear big spikes on our feet called crampons so we could walk around without slipping. This cave was amazing. The ice in the ceiling was glowing blue anad green because the sunlight from far above was shining through the ice and lighting it all up. And we couldn't understand why this cave was so much colder than Snow Dragon until we got to the end and we found out why. There was a huge pit or shaft called a moulin going 130 feet straight up to the surface of the glacier. Cold air from the top of the mountain was flowing down this hole and blasting through the cave, freezing everything inside of it. And we were so excited about finding this new pit, we actually came back in January the following year so we could be the first ones to explore it. It was so cold outside, we actually had to sleep inside the cave. There's our camp on the left side of this entrance room. The next morning, we climbed out of the cave and hiked all the way to the top of the glacier, where we finally rigged and rappelled this pit for the very first time. Brent named this cave Pure Imagination, I think because the beautiful sights we saw in there were beyond what we could have ever imagined.
Nedugo nakon mapiranja Snežnog zmaja Brent je nedaleko od njega otkrio novu pećinu. Unutrašnjost joj je bila obložena snegom, te smo morali da na obući nosimo krampone protiv proklizavanja. Pećina je bila neverovatna. Sneg na tavanici se presijavao na plavo i zeleno jer su sunčevi zraci odgore padali kroz led i osvetljavali celu pećinu. Nije nam bilo jasno zašto je ta pećina bila hladnija od Snežnog zmaja dok nismo stigli do kraja. Otkrili smo ogroman otvor koji se zove „mulin“, dugačak 40 metara i koji ide do površine glečera. Hladan vazduh s vrha planine se spuštao kroz tu rupu i šibao je pećinom, ledeći sve unutra. Bili smo toliko uzbuđeni zbog tog otkrića da smo se narednog januara vratili kako bismo je prvi istraživali. Napolju je bilo toliko hladno da smo morali da spavamo u pećini. S leve strane ulaza se vidi naš kamp. Narednog jutra smo se popeli iz pećine i otpešačili sve do vrha glečera, gde smo se konačno uz pomoć konopca uspentrali prvi put kroz taj prolaz. Brent je tu pećinu nazvao Čista mašta, jer stvari koje smo tamo videli nismo mogli ni da zamislimo.
So besides really cool ice, what else is inside these caves? Well not too much lives in them because they're so cold and the entrance is actually covered up with snow for about eight months of the year. But there are some really cool things in there. There's weird bacteria living in the water that actually eat and digest rocks to make their own food to live under this ice. In fact, this past summer, scientists collected samples of water and ice specifically to see if things called extremophiles, tiny lifeforms that are evolved to live in completely hostile conditions, might be living under the ice, kind of like what they hope to find on the polar icecaps of Mars someday. Another really cool things is that, as seeds and birds land on the surface of the glacier and die, they get buried in the snow and gradually become part of the glacier, sinking deeper and deeper into the ice. As these caves form and melt their way up into the ice, they make these artifacts rain down from the ceiling and fall onto the cave floor, where we end up finding them. For example, this is a noble fir seed we found. It's been frozen in the ice for over 100 years, and it's just now starting to sprout. This mallard duck feather was found over 1,800 feet in the back of Snow Dragon Cave. This duck died on the surface of the glacier long, long ago, and its feathers have finally made it down through over 100 feet of ice before falling inside the cave. And this beautiful quartz crystal was also found in the back of Snow Dragon.
Pored sveg tog leda, čega još ima u pećinama? Skoro ih ništa ne nastanjuje jer su jako hladne a ulazi su prekriveni snegom skoro osam meseci godišnje. Ali ima vrlo zanimljivih stvari. U vodi živi neobična bakterija koja se hrani kamenjem i vari ga da bi sebi napravila hranu i živela pod ledom. Ovoga leta su naučnici skupili uzorke vode i leda da provere da li ekstremofili, mali organizmi koji su se prilagodili lošim uslovima, mogu da žive pod ledom, kao da se nadaju da će jednog dana na Marsu naći polarne kape. Zanimljivo je i to što, kada se seme ili ptice spuste na površinu glečera pa uginu, oni porinu u sneg i na kraju postanu deo njega, tonući sve dublje i dublje. Topljenjem i formiranjem pećina, takvi artefakti se sliju kroz tavanicu i padnu na pod, gde ih mi na kraju nađemo. Pronašli smo npr. ovo seme plave jele. Zaleđeno je preko 100 godina, i tek sada počinje da klija. Ovo pero divlje patke pronađeno je na udaljenosti od pola kilometra u Zmajevoj pećini. Patka je davno uginula na površini glečera i njeno perje je prošlo kroz 30m leda dok nije upalo u pećinu. A ovaj divni kvarcni kristal je pronađen na kraju Snežnog zmaja.
Even now, Brent and I find it hard to believe that all these discoveries were essentially in our own backyard, hidden away, just waiting to be found. Like I said earlier, the idea of discovering in this busy world we live in kind of seems like something you can only do with space travel now, but that's not true. Every year, new caves get discovered that no one has ever been in before. So it's actually not too late for one of you to become a discoverer yourself. You just have to be willing to look and go where people don't often go and focus your eyes and your mind to recognize the discovery when you see it, because it might be in your own backyard.
Brent i ja još ne možemo da verujemo da smo sve te stvari otkrili praktično na sopstvenom pragu, kao da su tako skrivene samo čekale da budu pronađene. Kao što sam već rekao, otkrivanje u ovom užurbanom svetu u kome živimo čini se da je poput putovanja svemirom, što nije istina. Svake godine se otkriju nove pećine koje niko do tad nije video. Još nije kasno da i vi postanete istraživači. Treba samo da budete voljni da zavirite i kročite na mesta gde ljudi obično ne idu i da oči i um usredsredite na prepoznavanje pravog otkrića, jer ona mogu ležati na vašem kućnom pragu.
Thank you very much.
Hvala.
(Applause)
(Aplauz)