What’s the best way to spend a sunny Sunday? Going underground and crawling in the dirt of course! What else? I managed to get back into a cave system, which I started to work with in 2015. Things have changed a lot since then. Back in the days the cave mainly consisted of narrow crawling passages and eventually emerged in a portal at the glacier front. Well, the glacier is gone, retreated a lot further up the mountain. The cave is still there, requiring a nice little 40 m rappel to enter the world of what was once below the glacier. A nasty crawling passage between the sediments, leading into massive cavities undercutting the entire area and showing signs of rapid expansions and inwards collapses.
Eventually all the ice that is still left in the area will just collapse on top of those channels, that according to theory, shouldn’t exist. Channels in which the rain from last week is still pooling far below the surface. Channels in which the permafrost is also rapidly disappearing. There are a lot of things lurking beneath the surface.