Veryovkina Cave. At 7,257 feet (2,212 m) deep, Veryovkina Cave is the deepest cave on Earth. The cave is so deep that it takes over four days and thousands of feet of rope to descend to its immense depth.
And certainly, what would the deepest cave be without a couple of horrifying incidents? These are those stories. [music] On the border of Russia and Georgia is a mountain range known as the Caucasus Mountains.
This mountain range is notable for a few reasons. First, it's home to Europe's highest peak, Mount Elbrus at 18,500 feet (5,639 m). Then, on the Western side of the region of Abkhazia is a subrange of the Caucasus Mountains known as the Gagra Range.
There are some decent-sized mountains in this area as well. The highest among them is just over 11,000 feet (3,353 m), but this area is notable for another reason. The Gogra Range is primarily a limestone mountain range carved out by rivers over its geological history.
The prehistoric rivers created a bunch of deep canyons and the largest caves on Earth that are currently known. In fact, the Gagra mountains are home to four of the deepest caves anywhere on Earth and the deepest of these is Veryovkina Cave at over 7,000 feet (2,314 m) deep. For context, that's the same as stacking 23 Statue of Liberties on top of one another.
The entrance to Veryovkina Cave is also located in an altitude of 7,500 feet (2,286 m), meaning that you have to climb up a literal mountain to get to it. Once you're up there, you're still surrounded by the rocky cliffs of the mountain ranges and then in the middle of these cliffs is a fairly unremarkable looking hole in the ground. It's obvious that it's the entrance to a cave, but you never expect it to descend for over a mile into the Earth.
When the entrance was first discovered in 1968 by a group of cavers, they only descended down to a depth of 377 feet (115 m) before returning to the surface. Then in 1983, the cave was discovered for a second time by a separate team of speleologists from the Perovo Speleo Club from Moscow. Over the next three years, a series of expeditions pushed the depth to around 1,400 feet (427 m) but then for reasons that are unclear, there were no more expeditions until the year 2000.
Work resumed again that year, but it would take all the way until 2015 to discover a new shaft that would unlock the true depth of Veryovkina Cave. By 2017, they extended the maximum depth of the cave from 1400 feet (427 m) all the way to 7,200 feet (2,194. 5 m) and mapped over 17 kilometers (10.
6 miles) of tunnels and passages. Then, finally in March of 2018, the official deepest point of the cave was discovered at the bottom of a subterranean lake where the cave meets the water table, giving Veryovkina Cave a total depth of 7,257 feet or 2,212 meters. Six months later in September, the Perovo team returned once again to continue exploring the cave and this time, they were joined by photographers Robbie Shone and Jeff Wade.
It was the same team of world-class cavers from the Perovo club that made all of the seminal descents of Veryovkina and of the other deep caves in the Gagra Mountain Range. Led by team leader Pavel Demidov, this expedition would be returning to the bottom of Veryovkina Cave to collect samples of some of the potentially undiscovered species and explore some of the promising horizontal passages at the bottom of the cave, all while having Robbie and Jeff document the entire thing. Now, in an ordinary cave of moderate depth where you can descend and ascend in a single day, you'd still be bringing a decent amount of equipment because you need food and a bunch of climbing gear for every single person on the team.
In caves as large as Veryovkina Cave, the descent is more similar to an expedition that you'd expect to see when climbing a tall mountain. If you've ever watched anything related to Mount Everest, you may have heard of the multi-camp system. These camps are established higher and higher up the mountain to store food and gear and for the climbers to sleep and stay in between climbing.
For multi-day expeditions on a mountain or in a deep enough cave, the amount of gear becomes way too much to transport at a single time. People have to climb up and down in advance to transport load after load of the necessary equipment to ensure a safe attempt and Veryovkina Cave is no different. In fact, because of how deep it is, it has a total of six camps at various depths on the way to the bottom.
From the entrance, climbers have to put on special clothing, harnesses and helmets fixed with headlamps. They then descend down the first shaft into the darkness and move through a series of tight tunnels and passages to reach the first camp at 2,000 feet (610 m). This camp is a permanently installed camp where gear and equipment are stored year-round for emergencies.
Then, over the course of the next four days, Robbie, Jeff and the Perovo Speleo Club made their way to camp 6, all the way down at 6,900 feet (2,103 m). On their way, the temperature was just a few degrees above freezing. They crawled through mud and water, impossibly tight squeezes and descended down 100 foot (30.
5 m) shaft over nothing but air. The thousands of feet of ropes that they used to make the descent were their only means of transportation in and out. Then, finally, they set foot onto the flat, sandy camp 6 set up in a large horizontal tunnel.
This would be their home for the remainder of the expedition. Over the next three days, the team set out from their camp to complete all of the tasks they had intended. One of these was to bring Robbie and Jeff to the lake that sits at the bottom.
When they got there, they were stunned to see this beautiful turquoise water surrounded by jet black limestone. Lake is 50 feet long (15. 24 m), 25 feet (7.
6 m) wide and is actually 28 feet (8. 5 m) deep. If not for the lights they brought, it would sit there in complete darkness entirely without color.
On day seven, everything was still going according to plan. And that day two of the members of the team had to leave early to catch a flight home. When they got up to camp three, there was a ton of water pouring into the cave.
A massive storm up on the surface had caused a flood pulse to send thousands of liters of water rushing in. Inside these caves, you can't really communicate wirelessly because of the thick layers of rock. So instead, cavers have to run a physical line the entire length of the cave to communicate.
The two team members immediately tapped into the cable to warn the others about the flood pulse headed their way. Down at camp 6, they weren't all that worried when they initially got the call. Flood pulses are a common thing that cavers have to worry about.
A single milliliter of rain is one liter per square meter, meaning that a single square kilometer receives a thousand liters of water, if just a single milliliter of rainfall. In heavy rain, that number is significantly higher. All of this water then bursts down into caves in equally huge volumes and can last for hours, depending on the volume of rain and how long it rains for.
Again, they weren't all that worried when they first got the call. The Perovo group is world-class and their plan was to monitor the water level and then plan accordingly. Camp 6 had also been set up off of the main vertical shaft in what looked to be an area away from the flow of water.
It was also at 6,900 feet (2,103 m), whereas the total depth was over 7,200 feet (7,194. 5 m). For the water to reach them, it would have to fill up 300 feet (91 m) of passages below them before it would reach them.
About half an hour after they received the call, they heard the first sound of water approaching. It started off as a faint rumble and slowly grew like a train approaching. By the time it was just about to reach the camp, it was so roaring loud that it was almost deafening.
The entire cave shook like a constant earthquake was going on. Robbie had just started breakfast when the noise really started and he and the others rushed out of their tents to see the approaching storm. As they turned their headlights towards the vertical shaft, a fire hose of water came pouring down.
Robbie stood there with his mouth open and almost dropped the food he was holding. Not nearly as experienced as the Perovo team, Robbie was really concerned by the volume and speed of the water rushing in. But again, the spot they were in was completely dry, so he tried to stay calm like his Russian comrades.
About two hours into the flooding with no signs of it slowing, one of the team members noticed a gurgling sound coming from a small hole near the tent. He looked into the hole and couldn't see any water, but he figured he should tell the team leader anyway. Pavel agreed that this was a bit concerning, so they decided to go and check out a nearby siphon to see how much the water table had risen.
They returned about five minutes later and looked to the hole once again. This time, not only could they see water, but it was rising so fast, it was sloshing up around against the walls and almost out of the hole. The team member looked back at Robbie and Robbie saw that his face had gone completely white.
Immediately, he knew that this meant that they needed to leave and leave right away. With the sound of water still almost deafening, all hell broke loose in the camp. No one expected to be leaving that day but now, everyone was running around, packing up essential gear.
Robbie and Jeff pulled on their latex suits over their fleece base layer. After that, they slipped on their abrasion-resistant nylon shells and harnesses. Robbie then made the tough decision to leave all of his camera equipment and personal items.
Literally tens of thousands of dollars of equipment. He knew he couldn't risk being slowed down, or it could cost him his life or the life of one of his teammates. He pulled all of the memory cards out of the cameras, placed them in a ziploc bag, and then slipped them into his latex suit.
At the very least, he could save all of the pictures he had taken. With that, he called out to the others that he and Jeff would start their ascent and then they started off with the vertical shaft out of the quickly flooding camp 6. This would be the last interaction that they would have with the Russians at camp 6.
The remaining members of the Perovo team would wait for the team leader Pavel before starting their ascent. As Robbie and Jeff made their way to the vertical ropes, they reached a narrow traverse, almost like a bridge that went along one wall. Prior to the flooding, the chamber beside the bridge was 60 feet (18.
3 m) deep and 25 feet (7. 6 m) wide of nothing but air. Now, it was almost completely flooded, almost coming up over the side of the bridge.
At the end of this narrow traverse where the vertical ropes end, the source of the water pouring into the cave. Robbie stepped into the waterfall, pouring down from the shaft, and clipped his ascenders to the rope. Then he put his head down, took a deep breath, and started making his way up the rope as the water pummeled him from above.
The water was coming down so hard, it felt like it was crushing and suffocating him. It was literally as if his head was being squashed into his shoulders. Thankfully, he was able to tuck his chin, which allowed the water to run off of his helmet and create a small air pocket for him to breathe.
Focusing on just the white rope directly in front of his face, he moved his ascenders up rhythmically as fast as he could. Finally, he reached an area with a small outcropping that he could step on and out of the waterfall to look up. He saw that the rope was coming out of a shoulder-sized hole in the rocks, but this was also the source of the water.
Coming out of this little hole was a fire hose of water that seemed to take up the entire space. He thought to himself that there was no way he was gonna be able to make it through that intense downpour. At the same time, he couldn't just stop.
He was the lead climber. Everyone else was coming up behind him and there was no telling what the water was like down below. He had to at least try to make it through.
When he got to the hole, the force of the water was so strong that he was only able to push his ascenders a couple inches at a time. He finally made it through the squeeze and then realized that Jeff would have to do the same thing. He had no idea whether or not Jeff would be able to make it, so he just kept climbing as high as he could to get out of the way.
In his panic, he hadn't realized that this new section of the cave was mostly dry. The water flowed down a different route to the squeeze, so he was relatively safe where he was. But because he was so full of adrenaline, he was mindlessly climbing for his life as fast and as high as he could.
He only finally realized what he was doing when Jeff yelled out to him to slow down. Snapping out of it, he stopped and waited for Jeff to catch up before they continued. When Jeff reached him, his face was white, his eyes were wide, but he exclaimed that they were at least alive.
The two of them silently wondered if the same could be said for the Perovo team down below. Robbie and Jeff eventually made it up to camp 5 at 6,200 feet (1,890 m) where they waited, hoping they would see the Russians any minute. As the cave continued to shake around them, they occasionally looked down over the edge into the abyss.
Miraculously, down below, they saw single headlamp slowly making its way up the shaft. When he was finally close enough, they realized it was Andrey. After he climbed up into camp, they asked him if he had seen the others and he just shook his head silently.
They all sat there, thinking about the worst-case scenario. Down below, by the time Pavel had returned from the siphon, the bridge that Robbie and Jeff had walked across was completely submerged. The rest of the team members had to actually swim to reach the vertical ropes.
The last to swim out was Pavel and as he was making his way out, the chamber had become a swirling vortex. All of the water draining deeper into the cave had turned into a giant whirlpool. When he went through it, it spun him around and he had to swim hard to make it to the line.
By the time they were ascending, all of the deeper passages were completely submerged in water. Then, 15 minutes after Andrey emerged, five more lights could be seen making their way up the shaft. One by one, all of the remaining members of the Perovo team made their way up to camp 5.
Robbie watched the ascend out of the flooded passage and couldn't believe how strong and capable they were. One team member was even carrying a stove and four sleeping bags attached to his harness. He thought to himself how glad he was that it was him and Jeff that had gone first.
If they had been the ones to climb up last, it's likely that they wouldn't have survived. And then when they climbed up into camp, they were quickly in the tent, having coffee and laughing about the entire ordeal. Robbie on the other hand, was still thoroughly freaked out.
For hours, he refused to take off his gear and kept looking down into the chasm to see if the water was still rising. 200 feet (61 m) above them was a horizontal passage that they needed to pass to move higher into the cave. Normally, it's already half-filled with water and you have to crawl through it.
With all of the flooding, it was completely filled with water. As long as the flooding continued, they were trapped and just had to hope that the water didn't continue to rise higher. Pavel reassured Robbie that they would wait until morning to let the water clear.
And then over the course of the next 16 hours at the camp, the roaring of the water slowly died down. The flood pulse ultimately lasted a total of 20 hours and was the result of a week of rain followed by a single severe storm. The week of rain had completely saturated the ground so by the time the storm happened, the water poured relentlessly into Veryovkina Cave.
They later learned from a cab driver that the rain drops from the storm had been the size of nickels. This was actually a good learning experience for the team. They had previously been operating under the assumption that the cave only flooded in the wintertime.
Following the expedition, plans were put in place to improve the surface monitoring to watch rain. Another camp was installed in the lower chambers to provide another escape point in the event of flooding. And despite this expedition being cut short, they had completed essentially everything they had set out to do.
New passages had been explored and mapped, cave species had been sampled, and although the camera equipment was destroyed, all of the pictures were preserved. But this wouldn't be the last accident to ever occur in Veryovkina Cave. Two years later in November of 2020, some people exploring the area noticed a rope fixed at the cave's entrance.
This is typically a big no-no in the caving world, because then, anyone can access the cave and potentially get hurt or lost if they're unprepared. Eight months later on August 4th, 2021, the same Perovo team returned to continue their work in Veryovkina Cave. They descended into the cave as they had three years earlier, but then at 1300 feet (396 m), they found a pair of crampons and an ice axe.
This didn't make sense. This equipment couldn't have just fallen into the cave from the entrance. There were no straight drops to where the equipment was found.
This meant that someone had to have come into the cave and deep into the cave. They continued further in, all the way to the permanent camp at 2000 feet (610 m). Then, to the second camp at 3,200 feet (975 m).
And then all the way at 3,600 feet (1,097 m). Halfway into the deepest cave on Earth, they found the badly decomposed body of a man. He was wearing camouflage overalls, tracking boots, a helmet, he had two cell phones and he was still attached to the rope that he had used to descend into the cave.
By the looks of the decomposition, he had been there for months. Although he had no ID on him when he was found, authorities were able to identify the man as 37-year-old Sergei Kozeev using a missing person's database. Then, using the information from the cell phones found on him, they were able to figure out what had happened that led to his death.
Sergei lived in the city of Sochi, Russia, just East of the Russian border with Georgia and about two hours from the entrance to Veryovkina Cave. He was an avid outdoorsman and frequently went on solo expeditions to explore the wilderness. On November 1st, 2020, he said goodbye to his family as he always did when he was going on one of these solo expeditions and then set off for the Gagra Mountains.
He also didn't tell them where he was going, despite the fact that he was heading to a location that fewer people had set foot in than the international space station. Based on the documents and screenshots found on his phone, it seems that Sergei had spent almost a year planning this trip. He had printed out maps and materials from the expeditions made by the Perovo team specifically to navigate down into the cave.
First, he made the ascent up into the mountains, to the cave entrance using his crampons and ice axe. Then, he fixed a rope to the opening and descended down into the darkness of Veryovkina Cave. Using the information that he had gathered from the Perovo team, he hauled all of his equipment in three transport bags through the tunnels and narrow passages.
Then, using a lattice descender, he traveled down the massive vertical shafts all alone. He successfully made it to the first camp and then left some of the equipment later discovered by the Perovo team and then proceeded almost directly to the second camp. It was determined by the excrement found on site that he lived at the second camp for about a week before descending further into the cave.
From the second camp, things got a bit more challenging. Beyond that camp, there are some larger and more technically challenging vertical shafts. In addition, the cave becomes significantly wetter from that point onward.
As any caver knows, proper equipment is crucial. The standard fleece underlayer with a waterproof outer layer is crucial to surviving the cold and wet subterranean environment. It's unclear exactly what happened in Sergei's last moment, but it seems as though he realized that he wouldn't be able to descend any further through the water with the equipment he had.
At which point, he would've tried to make his way back up the cave, but because he had already descended into a technically challenging area, he was unable to get back out. Sergei had brought ascenders for his hands, but he didn't have any stirrups for his feet, meaning that he had no footholds for any of the long vertical shafts. He must have tried and tried to make his way out of the cave but between the exhaustion and the cold, he eventually laid down to sleep one last time and never woke up.
Upon finding his body, The parade team went back up to the surface and alerted authorities. Due to the difficulty of the cave and the depth that Sergei's body was found at, it would take a team of over a hundred individuals to eventually retrieve it. It's also particularly risky to be in a confined space like a cave with a decomposing body because the gas that's given off from the decomposition process can build up and become toxic at high enough levels.
Despite how many people were involved in the rescue, they still ended up having to cut Sergei into pieces to successfully remove him from the cave. After his retrieval, his body was finally returned to his wife and kids in Sochi. For now, Veryovkina Cave is the deepest cave on Earth.
But the Earth is a big place and caves are not nearly as readily viewable as their mountain counterparts. Veryovkina Cave was only crowned the deepest in 2018. It remains to be seen whether it will hold its place as the deepest on Earth.
Hello everyone. My name is Sean and welcome to Scary Interesting. If you made it this far, I just wanted to thank you for watching.
This is part 10 of the ongoing series Cave Exploring Gone Wrong so you may wanna check out the other videos in the series. If you enjoyed this video, I'd really appreciate it if you gave it a like. That helps out with the YouTube algorithm.
And once again, thank you so much for watching and hopefully, I will see you in the next one.
