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Comment by elymar | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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