Cave Digging is the practice of enlarging undiscovered cave openings to allow entry. Cave digging usually follows a search of mountains and valleys in karst topography for new caves. Often it takes place underground in places where a large passage has clearly been backfilled with silt, or choked with boulders. Sometimes chisels or explosives can be used to widen constrictions in the passage when spaces are evident on the other side.
Digs are in unstable parts of a cave and often need to be shored up with scaffolding or concrete to prevent re-collapse. It can be a dangerous activity, depending on the circumstances.
Read more about Cave Digging: Geological Cave Indicators, Technique
Famous quotes containing the words cave and/or digging:
“Do you know how poetry started? I always think that it started when a cave boy came running back to the cave, through the tall grass, shouting as he ran, “Wolf, wolf,” and there was no wolf. His baboon-like parents, great sticklers for the truth, gave him a hiding, no doubt, but poetry had been born—the tall story had been born in the tall grass.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“You know, many people believe that we archaeologists are just a collection of old fogies digging around in the ruins after old dried up skulls and bones.”
—Griffin Jay, and Harold Young. Stephen Banning (Dick Foran)