Explore the Hidden and Fragile World Inside Caves | Short Film Showcase

Oh [Music] my name is Nancy Ellen Bach. I am a second-generation caterer. I've been caving my entire life. I feel more at home underground than I do anywhere else. This is where I belong and I am a sustaining contributor of the Southeastern Cave Conservancy.

I think cavers go into caves for a variety of different reasons. Some people enjoy, you know, the biology, the hydrology and stuff, and some people might see the adventure of caving as being the physical parts of it: the repelling, the climbing out of the pits. For me personally, the adventurous side of caving is really the mystery of the unknown. It's the exploration part of it. What are we going to find? That passage is breathing a lot of air, so hopefully we will find a lot more cave beyond. People walk above ground and they don't know what's under here. I hope with a little secret that no one else might know about what's around that corner. It's just an amazing feeling when you can be the first person to see an area or a cave no one else has ever seen before. That's the most amazing secret you could ever have.

One of the things that people most often overlook about caves is the fact that water has influenced the caves throughout history. My name is Brad Barker. I'm a teacher of high school science. I teach biology and environmental science at Georgia School for the Deaf, and I'm also a caver and a sustaining member of the Southeastern Cave Conservancy.

Understand that 350 million years ago and older, during the Williston period, known as the Mississippi Ananda and Pennsylvania, areas of Florida, Georgia, parts of Alabama, up into Tennessee, all of those were covered in a shallow sea. What that means is this area was completely underwater and covered in life. The seafloor became what we now have as rock on the surface. This rock is called limestone. Limestone has one interesting property, and that is when anything acidic hits it, it starts to dissolve it. And just as it rains, it basically starts to just erode it away a little bit at a time. I mean, we're talking millions of years to create these huge caverns underground.

[Music] The Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia area, where the three states come together, is called TAG. We know it by cavers—we go TAG caving. Here in the Cumberland Plateau is geologically perfect for caves. So we are lucky enough in the TAG area to have the highest concentration of caves in the United States. This is the mecca for caving.

Between Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia, there are 17,000 known caves. Every year, cavers and explorers are continually finding new caves. They're finding UK passages that have never been known to exist before, and all of this is because of the water that falls. But not only is the water creating these caves by flowing through them, in a kind of way creating the cave but destroying the rock at the same time. Minerals and calcium inside of the water, whenever it sits there and drips off slowly, will start to form formations such as stalactites on the ceiling, you've got stalagmites on the floor, you've got columns. And so all of a sudden, the water that made the cave has now become the water that is creating these beautiful formations that we like to look at.

One thing that's really important to understand is, in the karst area of the United States, whenever it rains, the water immediately enters the groundwater. What that means is when there's pollution, the pollution spreads into the groundwater and people's drinking supplies much faster, and it's going to have a detrimental effect on the health of the humans in the area. But also it impacts the entire ecosystem inside the caves but also outside of the cave as well.

This secret part that is so important for us is that we have to protect the watersheds. We've got to protect the areas around the caves because if we let pollution get into these ecosystems, then we basically destroy an entire ecosystem inside of caves, and that's something that we can't go back and fix. Caves are nutrient-limited environments. Generally, bats bring in guano, cave crickets move back and forth to the surface, things fall in entrances or are blown in. But a major source of nutrients in caves is water, and so the quality of water that enters a cave is critical to cave life in that cave. When we see disturbances in the water that flows into a cave, cave communities suffer and can collapse.

My name is Kirk Ziegler. I am a biology professor at the University of the South in Suwannee, Tennessee. I'm a member of the SEC, and I've done research on K biodiversity and a handful of SECI caves. Caves host a diverse community of organisms, and it's largely secret life—things that spend their entire lifecycle underground. Those are called cave obligate creatures.

There are terrestrial ones like spiders and millipedes, aquatic ones like cave crayfish, cave salamanders, and cave fish. The most interesting thing about them is they all came from surface ancestors, so it's an amazing example of convergent evolution in this challenging, no light, usually low food environment. In the southeast, we have about ten species of bats that use caves to varying degrees, and those are a critical part of cave ecosystems because they bring lots of nutrients into these nutrient-poor environments.

In the last few years, white-nose syndrome has spread into the southeast and it's a tremendous concern because we've begun to see declines in bat populations across the southeast. The impacts where cave ecosystems are many: fewer nutrients flowing into caves when fewer bats are moving in and out. Of course, bats have tremendous and extreme economic importance in surface ecosystems as well. So if our bat populations decrease significantly, it's going to have real human impact as well.

[Music] Cave entrances provide important habitats to a variety of plant species as well because of the high moisture and cool air that comes out of caves during the summertime. Those environments stay cooler than the surrounding forests. It's also a lot of exposed limestone, which some species specialize on. So there's a unique community of plants and animals that you can find right around cave entrances.

My name is Aimee Hink, and I'm a cave photographer and a member of the Southeastern Cave Conservancy. I am also in Huntsville cave rescue. I do my cave photography just to share this secret beauty of the underworld with everybody else. It's important for conservation because you can't conserve what you don't understand, and you can't understand what you don't see and explore. Not everybody can go in and explore caves, so what they see in my photography is hopefully what will prompt them to care about these amazing environments and all of their beauty.

My favorite kind of lighting for formations and things of that nature is definitely backlighting because I really like that high level contrast in my images. I love it because you get the concept that you're in a cave. For me, when I have that bit of dark in the image, there's that bit of wonder—you know, what's there? What's around the corner? And really that's kind of the beauty of caves: exploration.

There's really nothing to compare one to the other. Some are wet and they have huge raging rivers, so there are a large for whole; some you have to crawl in mud for thousands of feet to see anything. I have a special place in my heart for getting photographs of the huge pits that we have here in TAG, the vertical shafts. The challenge with that is getting something lit up so beautifully when you have this huge amount of space that just the brain can't comprehend.

With my photography, I'm able to capture these amazing environments and pass the secret beauty on to all future generations, which is something really no other medium can do. You can read something in a paper or listen to a story, but when you actually put a picture behind something, it makes it something worth conserving and something worth protecting. To me, that's really important.

[Music] Well, caving started more or less when I was about 2 years old. My dad took me in a backpack and slid me all the way down through the little tunnel chute. I got in there, and I was completely amazed. It was dark, and I mean, I was a two-year-old; I was certainly scared the first time. From then on, I've just enjoyed it ever since.

My name is Zane Holcomb, certified in Wilderness First-Aid and hoping to become Wilderness First Responder certified. Well, my father—the very first thing he taught me is walk in and leave no trace. You pack out exactly what you carry in. He taught me all the different ways to go in and become a respectable person of how to maintain a cave and leave it in its original beauty. I hope to pass this on to my children and their children and on down the line.

It's so important for us to strike that balance between wanting to enjoy going into the caves and also wanting to pass this sense of adventure or these secrets on to the next generations. But it has to be done responsibly, so it's so important that we teach the conservation side of caving—taking good care of it. It's a non-renewable resource that can be damaged so easily. It's not like if you cut down a tree, a tree will grow back. If you break a formation or step in a stream and destroy that habitat, then it's a non-renewable resource.

So it's so important to educate people so that we can have proper conservation of these amazing resources. The reason why caves are such a secret is probably because cavers tend to be very closed-lipped about where the caves are, and it's not because we don't want to share these beautiful places with everybody; it's that we like to make sure that people have the proper training and the proper education of how to cave softly so that these resources aren't damaged, and we can, you know, pass these on to our future generations to.

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