BULLEVARD LIFE
&
STYLE
BEYOND
Abyss of Cenote
WHAT LIES BENEATH
When a lake in the Italian Dolomites suddenly drained, explorers discovered a prehistoric world quite literally frozen in time
T
wenty-five years ago, in the vicinity of Conturines Spitze in Italy’s Dolomites, a group of divers hiked to a lake in the mountains of the FanesSenes-Braies Nature Park, only to discover it had disappeared. Where there had once been deep water, the divers instead found a hollow basin and an enormous ice mass, with strange craters leading underground. News of these mysterious craters spread, and explorers and researchers flocked to the area to investigate further. What they discovered was a giant cave entrance that had been wedged shut for centuries by an ice-covered
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passage, acting like a cork in a wine bottle. “It was impossible to explore further than 70m inside the ice,” says Italian cave explorer Tommaso Santagata. “Melting ice water was feeding into an underground stream when it was warm, and when it got colder the cave passage closed again from the accumulation of snow.” For the next 16 years, explorers tried to access the cave’s hidden chambers but were constantly beaten by the forces of nature, until a cold autumn in 2010 finally allowed for a dry expedition into the huge 160m-deep shaft that lay beneath the cover of ice.
THE
ORDINARY