One night in April 45 years ago
I entered for the first time in a remote and lonely place
through a small hole.
Since then I have spent more than a thousand days underground,
a whole year of my life.
That night I contracted a powerful virus,
a passion that would accompany me the rest of the time.
Of all this I keep a meticulous record
in field notebooks that I keep with care.
Thanks to them you can accompany me on the journey to the depths
that we are about to undertake.
I would bet you think cavers
We are people who spend hours in a gym.
Nothing is further from reality, you just have to look at me.
(Laughter)
The muscle that we exercise the most down there is precisely this one.
The first step to go underground
it consists of finding openings that are practicable.
For this it is necessary to travel carefully the terrain.
A wild terrain, generally far from civilization
and where it is usually difficult to get oriented.
Fortunately, thanks to GPS it is possible to point out the position of a place
and return to it again and again, day, night, with rain, with fog
but what about when there was no GPS?
I could tell you about a lot of holes
whose search has cost us endless walks in the mountains,
and if not by chance or by a rare intuition,
we would never have found them.
You will be wondering where these openings are.
These openings are in a place known as karst,
a term that comes from a region of Slovenia
in which underground phenomena abound.
The water hardly circulates outside the karst.
The rock, where it emerges, shows cracked,
tortured by erosion.
Frequently, what appears on the surface has a lot to do with
with what happens inside the mountain,
and it is the logical evolution of geology.
Water takes advantage of any discontinuity
to get lost underground and dig deeper and deeper wells and galleries,
to form torrents, collectors and underground lakes.
Finally, it returns to the outside through springs and springs.
I must tell you that Spain is a speleological paradise:
one fifth of the territory consists of land
susceptible to harbor natural cavities.
And we must not forget the variety of climates and types of rock, the orography,
the privileged geographical position of the Peninsula and the archipelagos.
Spain is also the country of the great chasms.
More than twenty score more than a thousand meters deep.
Look at the biggest skyscraper built by man
and think that one of these holes far exceeds its size.
Also here are ten of the largest underground networks on the planet.
Four of them exceed 110 km of galleries,
and one of those four approaches 150 km.
These figures may confuse you,
do not believe that everything is like that, great, from the beginning.
In fact, the openings of many caves and chasms
they are tiny, improbable holes.
The only clue that there may be something interesting there
is the current of air that exhale,
as if the earth itself were breathing.
Sometimes one of these blow holes
It is hidden under a pile of rocks.
To make way for him we resorted to levers, pulleys, winches …
An exhausting job that does not always have a reward,
and sometimes, if we do not carefully measure the risks,
the catastrophe can happen.
At this point I want to read something of what I wrote
in one of my notebooks.
“When we have extracted the most voluminous
we have released an opening sufficient for a small body.
Without thinking, I wear a jumpsuit and harness and I take the narrowness.
At about 17 meters I reach a ledge.
With the beam of light I check with excitement
that is still going down
The stones fall and fall, air flows.
I’m like a motorcycle, but it’s late and I do not have any more rope.
So, I’m making the ascent.
I’m almost up already.
Suddenly, horror!
The huge built-in block on the vertical
It swings over my body, I barely touch it with my shoulder.
My heart races and I really feel panic.
An indescribable panic. “
Fortunately the story had a happy ending,
but just remembering it produces chills.
That rock of about 300 kg
that we thought was firmly embedded
in the mouth of the abyss
It brought me to the harsh reality.
You have to be sure a thousand percent before taking such risk.
The good thing about these initial moments
is that before undertaking access to a chasm,
before starting the exploration, we do not know what we are going to find.
Who would have thought, for example, that behind that insignificant opening
a small corridor of about 20 meters opens
that flows into the largest well in Spain and one of the largest in the world.
A formidable abyss of almost half a km of vertical fall
I do not know if you have an idea:
put five soccer fields, one after the other, and pick them up,
or if you want, time on your watch 15 seconds,
which is the time it would take a stone to reach the bottom
without touching any of the walls.
Believe me if I tell you to go into such a monster
It is an incomparable experience.
The descent of the wells forces us to create an artificial path of progression
using rope and very strong anchors,
what is called alpine technique.
It consists of installing the rope on expansive anchors
that are fixed on the rock from time to time.
The fundamental idea is that the rope never rubs against the wall.
In passing we look for the cleanest path away from loose stones
and especially far from the water.
Think that in high mountain time is variable;
a sudden storm can cause a real storm in the wells.
The exploration may conclude prematurely and sometimes dramatically.
And by the way, accidents are rarely accidental in caves.
We could talk, without fear of being wrong,
95% recklessness and only 5% bad luck,
and I assure you that an underground rescue is the most complicated thing that can be done.
At this point you are probably thinking
why take so many risks, why spend so many calamities.
We are not masochists.
I wish everything was as simple as going through a door
and discover, on the other side, endless wonders.
But the reality is very different.
To paraphrase an old French speleologist,
we could say that the mantra that guides the steps of the underground explorer
it would be something like “towards greatness because of difficulty”,
or if you prefer, “nothing is easy underground.”
Think, for example, when we are lowering a well
we reach a glimpse of the bottom, but we have no more rope.
(Voiceover) A stone goes.
(Knock)
100 meters. This was a month and a half ago.
Back home, back to reality,
we will spend the week imagining what awaits us down there,
We will build virtual passages, decorated where the water runs peacefully.
But there is not always a prize.
Too often the only reward for so much effort
It is an infamous place, full of mud, wet.
Luckily sometimes, on many occasions,
the compensation for so many calamities and so much suffering is superior
to what anyone could imagine.
Do not think that everything consists of going down, going up and contemplating these beauties.
There are, for example, those who study underground animals,
tiny beings that usually go unnoticed,
they live in the walls, the soil and especially in the groundwater,
and the latter are the most difficult to find.
In the laboratory, once the samples have arrived,
we have to do the taxonomic, genetic study to try, let’s say,
trace the particular DNI of each of these specimens.
I do not know if you can get an idea of what dissection is
of an animal of barely a millimeter.
Ana, my wife, I could talk about it long and hard,
it is the world specialist of a group of tiny crustaceans
that inhabit groundwater.
Why do not you think we’re going alone,
normally we always go with friends who accompany us, help us,
participate in these jobs,
They share with us the passion for the unknown.
Going alone is not a good choice underground.
There is a job for which it is not necessary to be a scientist,
a work of capital importance:
it’s about the topography.
It is the representation in plan, elevation and 3D of the cave.
It is an affordable job, any minimally trained,
a little clever, he is capable of carrying it out.
I must also say that it is tedious.
Too often the temptation to abandon us assaults us,
especially when we are in a very shabby place, with mud, water …
Fortunately, today we have the help of technical means
that facilitate the work.
For example, specially modified laser rangefinders
to be able to measure not only the distances, but also the angles,
that communicate by Bluetooth with programmable machines
in which it is possible to draw a nearly definitive plane directly in the cave.
Imagine what it was like before when you had to do everything by pulling a measuring tape,
measuring the angles with compass, inclinometer,
and sometimes in improbable positions.
A good topography will allow us to know the layout in space
of the galleries that make up the cave inside the massif,
and the possible use of its resources.
For example, water, which many places is scarce and difficult to find.
On the other hand, we can carry that topography loaded in our GPS,
what will help us when abroad,
about the projection of the galleries, we are looking for possible new accesses
or communications with nearby caves.
If everything went well and luck has been on our side,
we will have explored a great cave with superb passages, very nice corners.
I must tell you that there are splendid moments under the ground,
unique and incomparable,
because what we find down there does not exist anywhere else.
In addition, the caves, together with oceanic abyssal funds,
they are the last frontier to discovery on our planet.
And in a more prosaic plane,
you already know that they have always inspired fantasy, legends,
the myths about witches, fairies, dragons, treasures …
The only treasures we find are these
that you are seeing in the photographs.
Let’s talk about time.
How is time underground perceived?
I would tell you that, with a strange cadence,
sometimes very fast, sometimes slow, there is no constant.
I remember, for example, when we were illuminated with carbide light,
and standing in a corner of the cave,
we contemplated how the light was running out
until it is completely dark, surrounded by silence,
only broken by the odd drop of water
that rushed from the roof.
Without more reference than our rhythmic and constant pulse,
without that neither the humidity nor the cold altered our perception.
I must tell you that under the ground one experiences unique sensations,
of stillness, of serenity, of isolation,
sensations in any case that for me are pleasant,
and if I had to define the caves in a poetic way, I would say that they are something like that
as the kingdom of eternal night without stars,
although we with our LED lights break that darkness,
And there’s something I want to be clear, and it’s the vulnerable aspect of the caves.
A very fragile balance keeps them as we discovered them.
A balance that is very easy to alter voluntarily or involuntarily.
In fact, any minimum residue lasts time and time inside.
And sometimes also, involuntarily,
we destroy things that nature has taken many millennia to build.
For all that, and to finish,
I would like to remind you of the three golden rules of the speleologist.
Take note if they could serve you something.
The first: leave only the footprints of your footsteps.
Bring only memories in the form of photos.
And, please, do not kill anything other than time.
Thank you.
(Applause)
”
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