CAVE RESEARCH FOUNDATION IN THE MAMMOTH CAVE SYSTEM: A HALF-CENTURY OF EXPLORING AND MAPPING THE WORLD'S LONGEST KNOWN CAVE

One of the challenges of studying and protecting the globally significant resources of Kentucky's Mammoth Cave National Park is that many of them are underground. The Mammoth Cave System, with a current known length of over 560 kilometers and still growing, is the most extensive known cave on Earth. The primary reason that survey of the cave system is not yet complete is the cave's enormity. Since its incorporation in 1957, the Cave Research Foundation (CRF) has been cooperating with the park's management to conduct about ten expeditions a year in the park in a continuing effort to explore, survey, inventory and document the cave, and no end is in sight. Not only does this work identify locations and geometry of the passages themselves, but it documents the biological, mineralogical, cultural, archeological, and paleontological resources that they contain. The maps produced by the efforts are also an important resource for scientists who study the cave, its water, and how the cave relates to the associated landscape. We know now for example, in large part by cave survey, that the upstream ends of several of the cave's most significant underground rivers extend far beyond the park boundaries to agricultural land, industrial sites, and transportation corridors with detrimental impacts to the cave's water quality and aquatic ecology. The maps also provide critical resources for scientists in several other ways--base maps to plot the features they study, as well as "roadmaps" to find their way around (and back out of) this enormously complex labyrinth. A currently evolving task involves integration of these surveys into Geographic Information Systems databases.

CRF is also surveying and documenting other significant caves in the park, including Lee Cave (12+ km), Wilson Cave (6+ km), and Smith Valley Cave (4+ km), as well as a large number of minor ones in the "Small Cave Inventory" program. The foundation has also expanded into, and continues to survey significant caves and karst resources in, other park service units including Sequoia/Kings Canyon, Carlsbad Caverns, Lava Beds, Ozark Scenic Riverways, and Buffalo National River. In addition to its work with the NPS, CRF works with the Forest Service, BLM and state agencies in understanding karst resources.