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Palomar

Member

From: USA

Registered: 2002-05-30

Posts: 9,734

Re: Large Calcite Formation - ..."Snowy River"

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050601/ap_ … very]Click

*I don't seem to recall the news of this breaking even locally, but then it occurred in September 2001 (drowned out by other news...).

The original discovery drew a few local news reports, but scientists wanted to keep the passage's existence quiet until an environmental assessment could be done and arrangements could be made to protect it.

The stark white passage, looking like a river of snow surrounded by walls of brown clay and black manganese dioxide deposits, stretches more than two miles from Fort Stanton Cave in southern New Mexico.

Says Ft. Stanton Cave has few "secondary formations" such as stalactites and isn't a kin to Carlsbad Caverns (been there/done that twice -- well worth it).

They're speculating the calcite was deposited there 150 years ago, but perhaps is older than that yet. 

It's not easy to explore. So as not to contaminate the formation, scientists who go into the passage change shoes — and in some cases, clothes — when moving from the clay edges to the Snowy River formation, Cocoran said. The round trip to the south end requires 16 changes of shoes, he said.

They're describing it as a truly unique formation with nothing comparable to it yet known elsewhere.  Those scientists should be wearing plastic covers over their shoes, like surgeons do, and changing them too with every shoe change.

There are also microbiological considerations:

Penny Boston, director of the cave and karst studies program at New Mexico Tech in Socorro, has been studying the microbiology of the passage. She has found several types of bacteria that live in a lightless environment and are unknown anywhere else.

"The chemical byproducts of these bacteria may have pharmaceutical applications and there are other things biologists and biochemists can learn," Cocoran said.

--Cindy 

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We all know [i]those[/i] Venusians: Doing their hair in shock waves, smoking electrical coronas, wearing Van Allen belts and resting their tiny elbows on a Geiger counter...

--John Sladek (The New Apocrypha)