“As I scurried down a frost-covered slope into the cave, I couldn’t shake the distinct feeling that I was stepping into the maw of a prehistoric beast.” That’s Mark M. Synott, writing in the March 2017 issue of National Geographic, about a 31-member expedition put together to explore what could very well be the world’s deepest cave.
Called Dark Star, this “monstrous limestone cave system inside a mountain in a remote corner of Uzbekistan” was first discovered in 1984—but another six years went by before a British team reached it and began exploring the system.
The whole claustrophobia-inducing account, complete with great photography and a video, is available online here.
