Son Doong Cave Is So Big It Has Its Own Rainforest (2019) | Hacker News Reader

Son Doong Cave Is So Big It Has Its Own Rainforest (2019)

discovery.com

31 pointsthunderbong20 comments

> With time, collapsed ceilings have created holes called dolines, allowing lush foliage to grow and creating a remote and dangerously inaccessible jungle.

I would argue that holes from a collapsed ceiling of an underground cave makes it _dangerously accessible_ underground jungle.

Formed in Carboniferous/Permian limestone: also known as 47 million to 358 million years. Okay, this certainly wasn't in it's present state 20 million years ago. However my point is it is a very old and slow growing structure. Obviously a Doline is evidence of instability at one point in time. But when a structure exists for millions of years. Let me do the math here: 2 Dolines over 20 million years, screw it, I don't have to do the math. I'm comfortable walking through that structure.

https://archive.is/DgptX

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hang_S%C6%A1n_%C4%90o%C3%B2ng A bit more information and some nice photos also.

The scale of the Hand of Dog stalagmite: https://livingnomads.com/2016/05/hang-son-doong-trip/the-han...

Not available outside some specific country, and worse, it downloads a file to tell me that.

It is pretty depressing this type of stuff exists. It started with the EU privacy, which basically means that if you can view this content, you are tracked as much as they can. I have a sandboxed browser on a vpn; I cannot stand geo locking for any reason. But I am in the EU and I like not to be tracked, so I use VMs with VPN networking.

Plus it sources heavily from other websites, so it’s not even a good source of information.

A link from the article says:

> A major threat to the cave is that the government plans to commercialize it by installing transportation systems like cable cars. This would take away from the natural beauty and wonder of the cave. The logic behind the cable cars is to make it easier for tourists to explore the cave, but this modernization may ruin much of its allure because, the cave has not yet been tampered with by man. The system is designed to be able to carry 1,000 visitors to Son Doong in an hour.

We should start to pay money to govs that preserve things. It won’t happen because we are what we are, but we should be paying Brazil and DRC etc for preserving more than what they make by cutting and destroying. That would be the reasonable thing to do and it won’t happen.

People only take action after it is (way) too late. In personal life (health) and in world affairs.

Those two insanely corrupt countries will happily take your money and still cut down their forests anyways.

It would be really sad if that happened. The current (previous? Oxalis/Howard) guide company really cared about keeping the cave and its locale pristine.

The Wikipedia article mentions that these plans have been canceled.

Reminds me of the entry to the New Zealand Waitomo “Lost World” caves: https://www.waitomo.co.nz/edit/image_cache/lw38small_749x100...

Huh, weird, I get redirected to foodnetwork with a message saying "This site is not available in your country". I miss the internet.

"This site is not available on your country"

They failed at the Internet.

Ps: I'm in France

It's hilarious that the one saying it's not available is foodnetwork.

That’s a classic of lazy and data-hungry (as in selling user data) American sites.

In a way it’s positively self-selecting: these are rarely to never primary sources, just aggregators. Flag and move on.

The Master Sword's gotta be in there somewhere...

Not anymore, it’s being carried by the spoiler.

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