Canadian team confirms presence of huge unexplored cave in British Columbia | Hacker News Reader

Canadian team confirms presence of huge unexplored cave in British Columbia

canadiangeographic.ca

245 pointsExactoKnight79 comments

It's on OpenStreetMap already https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/651633176 and someone's named it the "Sarlacc Pit" (Star Wars reference). Unclear if the OSM editor came up with it or if it's from somewhere else.

>Bevan Ernst, a regional caribou biologist with the ministry, called it “Sarlaac Pit” (a reference to a subterranean creature that made a brief appearance in the film Return of the Jedi). Pollack added that the name Ernst gave the pit is unofficial and temporary. BC Parks is consulting with local First Nations to determine whether a traditional Indigenous name for the cave exists.

Thanks. As ggsp pointed out I missed that when reading the article.

Curious that they're going to consult with First Nations about whether there's an existing name. "Yeah we knew about that giant hole, just never thought to mention it before".

It might be more, yeah we knew about it and didn't want it fucked up with graffiti and litter so we didn't tell you about it.

Or even, we have stories about it but the location was lost.

The (temporary) name is mentioned in the article.

Google Maps has picked up the name "Saarlac Pit", spelled differently than OpenStreetMap, so apparently they have a second source for the name. It's about 40 miles from from the nearest road as the crow files, throughout mountainous terrain.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/52%C2%B030'59.9%22N+120%C2...

I can see how it escaped discovery.

There's a river going there, how could this have been missed? Anyone got a map of this?

BC is 950K km^2 with less than 5M people (drop Metro Vancouver and it's 2.5M). So 1.5 the size of France, the majority of which basically looks like Wells Gray (though Wells Gray has some extra beautiful spots). There are dozens of "Wells Gray like" parks, and most visitors don't hike up the mountains (and surely not off trails). So it's missable in theory.

[EDIT]: also mentioned in another cover - explorers believe cave was snow covered year-round up until 20-50 ago.

From the 2.5m remaining after you have subtracted Vancouver and the Fraser valley, now subtract the populations of nanaimo, Victoria, Kamloops, Kelowna, Nelson, osoyoos, Whistler, Campbell River, Prince George, fort St John, nelson and just about every other town that is big enough to have a few bank branches... The remaining rural area outside of any city limits is REALLY sparsely populated.

All this is true, but this is right outside Valemount and near Jasper National Park and in an area where there is a whole bunch of hiking, backcountry nordic and alpine heli-skiing and snowmobile tourism. It's not really the most remote part of B.C. Highway 16 isn't even that far away.

Are there any satellite imaging surveys or aerial surveys 50+ years ago that can confirm the assertion that the cave entrance has been covered with snow 100% of the time before 50 years ago?

We have photos of Robson and the glacier in jasper banph corridor, both are really close. And it was not “an assertion” but rather a conjecture.

>Are there any satellite imaging surveys or aerial surveys 50+ years ago that can confirm the assertion that the cave entrance has been covered with snow 100% of the time before 50 years ago?

You think people comb through satellite photos to look for cave entrances?

I was only asking what the basis was for the assertion that the cave entrance has been persistently covered with snow year-round prior to 50 years ago.

Here's a map with more recent, higher quality imagery than Google.

https://zoom.earth/#52.516747,-120.04313,19z,sat

So much for trying to keep its location secret :)

From the article: "Pollack wouldn’t reveal the exact location of the cave, saying only that it was in the northern section of the park. Asked whether he was concerned about protecting the site, he said, “We are, but also the thing is that this cave is truly in the middle of nowhere."

They put up a video showing arial shots of the hole and the surrounding area. Of course the internet is going to figure it out. The Wells Grey area isn't so big that you can't scour satellite maps of the whole area in a few hours.

An awful lot of BC is the middle of nowhere. Hell, once you get 100km past the US border things thin out pretty quickly.

BC is huge. For this particular spot, it's a very long distance from the nearest road, even one passable by high clearance 4x4. Unless you had the valley it's in as a specific destination, would be easy to miss. It is also not accessible by float plane, so either a multi day hike or helicopter.

If you look at where the population is concentrated in BC, the 10 largest cities, take a look at the total population of the province, and then look at how many square km it is...

No, this is actually quite close to a quite heavily traffic'd area -- Mt Robson and Jasper National Park are quite close. The town of Valemount not far. Hwy 16, the northern branch of the Transcanada Highway, the route between Edmonton (major city population ~1million and about 5 hours away) and most of B.C. is like 50km away. There is a major 4-season ski resort being built in Valemount over the next few years. Hiking, heli-sking, mountain biking, and snowmobiling are big sports in the area.

This is not some remote arctic outpost.

In addition to the other comments and explanations, I saw another article wherein one of the geologists mentioned that climate change could be a factor that previously inhibited its discovery - until a few decades ago, it was probably snow-covered year-round, which would make it much harder to see.

It's hard to tell on the satellite timelapse imagery, but overall you can visually tell that snow amounts have declined in the area. However, the very point where this cave is located still looks like a hole to me as of 1984.

Open a new browser window and open these two links into separate tabs and cycle through them fast until you get oriented. Not sure what conclusions you might draw from it. It's only 34 years' worth, but hmm.

1: https://earthengine.google.com/timelapse/#v=52.52697,-120.06...

2: https://www.google.com/maps/place/52%C2%B031'00.8%22N+120%C2...

https://goo.gl/maps/xAq3L86hkQ82

LOL someone on Google Maps already named it "Saarlac Pit Cave"

Not on my view in Google Maps.

Adjusting for 3D view and zooming out slightly, you really can see how remote it is!

From looking at the map, it looks like the valley for the river goes into the cave, and that there isn't much water down hill of it going into the main river. In hindsight that could be a big signal that there water is going underground.

Perhaps there are several other caves of similar size to be found?

It boggles the mind that something that massive didn't get picked up sometime, especially in this age of broadly accessibly high quality satellite imagery.

Maybe the indigenous people knew about it

Quite likely. I have no idea why this was downvoted. It's usually the case native populations had far greater knowledge than they are ever credited for. Perhaps they will find some evidence of humans inside.

It's quite possible that the indigenous population knew of the cave, but it's very unlikely they ever purposefully descended into it. There's not much reason to, and it would be a very difficult descent.

"Not much reason to, and very difficult" describes most of the history of human population expansion over the globe.

"To see what is there" has been reason enough most of the time.

There could be other entrances, collapses, etc.

And yet when my acquaintance summited Mt Everest, there was a Tibetan native there in a fur suit and hat.

I am almost certain that there will be evidence of native incursion into the cave. Its been there a long time; the natives have been there a long time. Young bloods with nothing to lose are always doing damn-fool things like that.

There's no evidence that Sherpas summited Everest prior to Norgay doing it with Hillary's expedition. Into The Silence covers this in more detail, if you care to read the whole book, but there were technological and cultural hurdles to it ever happening.

Everest is a pretty clear example of native people not bothering to do stupid things until white people show up and get them tangled up in the mess.

From what I have read they were pretty far up but there is a pretty hard limit to what you can achieve without technology. There is a huge difference between climbing to 8000m vs 8800m.

Technical detail (who was first to the tippy top). Sherpa's were climbing the mountain for centuries. Somebody has been in that cave, because its there.

the article said it had probably been covered with snow year round until 20 years ago.

> Maybe the indigenous people knew about it

Or the military.

Canada is mind bogglingly big.

Yes it is. My favorite anecdote about it is that the province of Ontario is big enough to have vineyards in the south and polar bears in the north.

Half of Canada's population lives south of the red line in this map, which is also further south than Seattle.

https://imgur.com/CenW9oi

Yup. That line is just north of Montreal, so the area south of it includes Canada's two largest metropolitan areas.

Did you know there's a tiny bit of Canada that is further south than the California-Oregon border?

Detroit is actually north of that tiny bit of Canada too. Blew my mind a little when we moved here.

Imagine the things that are waiting in the Universe to be discovered.

No kidding. Just the Wawa-Sault Ste. Marie-Timmins-Sudbury quad is large enough to be lost in for several lifetimes. One tell that you are about to enter uncharted territory is a sign that reads 'last gas station for 400km'.

And that is one of the more accessible areas, there are still plenty of lakes where a water plane can land and there are logging trails every 30 km or so.

I’m curious as to how there are massive caves like this that we still haven’t discovered. Wouldn’t satellite imagery along with some ML be able to find these?

I find it refreshing that there are still undiscovered spots on Earth left. I am not sure it's a good thing to make an effort to unveil them. I prefer random discovery.

I guess the intersection between the set of people with the sufficient capabilities to do that and the set of people hunting for caves isn't that big. Is there a registry of all such caves with their coordinates to act as a training set?

Generally, cave location datasets are not widely shared. The contents of caves, both physical and biological, tend to be susceptible--nonresistant and nonresilient--to damage from human activity. It's easier to keep the data "low key" rather than the expend effort on widespread education.

Not just that the cave gets damaged, but they tend to attract people who go in and get lost, injured or die due to being unprepared and not having extensive spelunking experience and training.

I wish we could keep this cave unexplored. I like the thought that there are places on Earth still untouched by human activity.

Don't worry, we haven't explored much of the underground.

The great north (both Canada and Russia) is covered with lakes and craters. It would be pretty hard to single out the caves from those.

Canada: https://www.google.com/maps/@60.1004328,-75.3335854,34459m/d...

Russia: https://www.google.com/maps/@72.0373772,97.0176475,62191m/da...

The best available imagery for remote areas is often crap.

Especially easily, publicly available imagery.

Here is short aerial shot video of the entrance https://youtube.com/watch?v=m0zCbxYravM

Did you read the article? It includes the same video.

Wow ... That Cave is huge ... What unexpected things could we find there?

Well... not to guess about the unexpected... but as for what is likely...

Following the pattern for caves in the Canadian Rockies, the lowest cave levels will be highly technical (wrt exploration techniques) with a cold and fast-moving river. The typical passage in such a cave often is somewhat like a slot canyon, but with more angular walls. The distance to the resurgence appears to be a couple of kilometers with an elevation difference of 450 meters. The geometry of flow from this swallet entrance to the resurgence looks joint or fault controlled directing the flow northward from the 'dry' valley's outlet. That is, the cave flow's exit is north of the dry valley's confluence with the north-south surface stream. Thus, a large amount of the cave is likely to occur deep under the mountain. With respect to exploration, this increases the chances that higher, drier alternate passageways and alternate infeeder streams exist aside from the main stream course. It is unclear from aerial imagery, but there is also some chance that the mountainside to the north and west of the entrance is karstified. If so, higher entrances are possible -- which could increase the total system depth. The deepest cave in Canada is ~650m from highest to lowest point. While most satellite imagery of the resurgent stream run show a whitewater cascade, there is some variation in flow. The cave at the resurgent spring would be one of the first places to investigate at low flow.

Congratulations to the team for a wonderful discovery!

(Just a quick impression. I have discovered quite a few sizable caves--not this one, of course)

Our Stargate...

The bones of excessively inquisitive natives.

Orcs. Definitely orcs.

Or a weird little shriveled guy with a ring.

Possibly mammoth and saber tooth tiger bones, if some fell in a long time ago.

Unlikely given the high altitude of the cave.

Reptilians

I used to live quite close to there. As the bird flies, doesn't seem that remote. Probably hard to get to though.

It seems a completely reasonable hike from the sandy bank of Azure lake (in summer).

On youtube there's a comment of some guy who went into this Cave V (he named it that way) some years ago. it's is huge he said. https://youtu.be/m0zCbxYravM

It contains a maze of twisty little passages.

I would be curious to see a picture of where the underground river emerges.

A dye trace would be in order, but this would be the most likely resurgence. https://zoom.earth/#52.514097,-120.011987,20z,sat

It seems like it’s full of water during the summers though...

Quick, someone get Musk!

Dear 8bitsrule, YouTube has very good quality videos now, welcome to the future. You are more than welcome to not open the YouTube link as you are browsing in low bandwidth mode, but your problems are not ours.

Edit: typo.

I thanked somebody for adding a link that I missed. For that and that alone, I was absurdly and illogically downvoted... anonymously.

It could have been much more productive. Instead of downvoting, the response could have been a polite note. Downvoting without comment is a disease I'll have no part of. There's already enough rancour aboard this fractious and constantly-derailing ship.

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