Hang Son Doong: The world's biggest cave, so 'outrageous in

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Hang Son Doong extends more than 3 miles(5 km )long and 660 feet(200 m)high.
(Image credit: Geng Xu/Getty Images)

FAST FACTS

Call: Hang Son Doong

Place: Quang Binh Province, Vietnam

Collaborates: 17.54696024669416, 106.14398574081777

Why it’s amazing: The cavern is the greatest worldwide and includes 2 jungles.

Hang Son Doong is the world’s biggest recognized cavern, with adequate area in a few of its passages to fly a Boeing 747 aircraft through them. The limestone cavern sits underneath a lavish jungle in Vietnam’s Phong Nha-Ke Bang National Park and hosts primeval forests that grow thanks to huge “skylights” in the rock.

Hang Son Doong cavern– the name implies “Mountain River” — is young compared to other limestone caverns. It formed 2 to 3 million years ago inside the most significant limestone massif in Asia, an enormous block of rock more than 400 million years of ages that was born from the compressed shells and skeletons of ancient sea animals. 2 rivers– the Rao Thuong and the Khe Ry– gushed through fractures in the limestone and wore down the rock, forming a huge tunnel in the massif that just recently became referred to as Son Doong.

Related: China’s’divine pits’: The huge sinkholes that have ancient forests growing within

Ho Khanh, a homeowner of Vietnam, found the cavern by possibility in 1990 while searching in the jungle. “He felt a blast of wind and heard the rush of a river inside,” Howard Limberta British cavern explorer and technical director at Oxalis Adventurea business that runs trips of Son Doong, informed CNN “But after he left, he couldn’t find it again, because it’s surrounded by foliage.”

Years later on, Khanh handled to backtrack his actions. In 2009, he led a caving group from the British Cave Research Association that consisted of Limbert to the cavern’s entryway. “We realized right away that it was major,” Limbert stated.

The group surveyed Son Doong and discovered it was the biggest natural cavern ever taped. Their measurements showed an overall cavern volume of 1.35 billion cubic feet (38.5 million cubic meters), which is large enough to fit almost 15 Terrific Pyramids of Giza

Scientists just recently found the cavern is even larger than that. A diving exploration in 2019 exposed that Son Doong is linked to another cavern called Hang Thung through an undersea tunnel. This link includes 57 million cubic feet (1.6 million cubic meters) to the cavern’s volume, or two-thirds of a Great Pyramid.

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A visitor checks out the Son Doong cavern by boat throughout an assisted trip. (Image credit: NHAC NGUYEN/Getty Images)

“It would be like someone found a lump on top of Mount Everest, making it another 1,000 meters [3,280 feet] higher,” Limbert stated. “Any cave in the world will be able to fit comfortably inside Son Doong when it’s connected — it’s just outrageous in size.”

Boy Doong is home to among the world’s highest stalagmitea beast pillar called the “Hand of Dog” determining 260 feet (80 m) highThe cavern is divided into 3 areas– the entryway, the fossil passages and the muddy Passchendaele Passage (called after the World War I Battle of Passchendaele, which soldiers battled in mud-filled trenches)– that each boast amazing developments.

As their names recommend, the fossil passages are filled with the remains of sea animals that when lived in an ancient sea in what is now main Vietnam. The Passchendaele Passage is home to a 300-foot (90 m) wall of calcite called the Great Wall of Vietnam, which cave explorers just handled to scale on their 2nd check out to the collapse 2010.

At the heart of Son Doong, the limestone ceiling collapsed long back to form 2 sinkholes that enable beams of light to shine into the cavern. And under these “skylights,” 2 jungles have actually grown for countless years.

Sascha is a U.K.-based student personnel author at Live Science. She holds a bachelor’s degree in biology from the University of Southampton in England and a master’s degree in science interaction from Imperial College London. Her work has actually appeared in The Guardian and the health site Zoe. Composing, she takes pleasure in playing tennis, bread-making and searching pre-owned stores for covert gems.