The Hang Son Doong cave in Vietnam, which survived untouched until 2009, dates back about 2 to 5 million years, to the Pliocene or late Miocene. The 5-kilometer-long cave system has 200-metre-high ceilings, making it the largest cave ever discovered on Earth.
This cave is so large that it is about five times larger than the previous “World’s largest cave” titled Deer Cave in Malaysia. Despite its size, however, its entrance was first discovered in 1991 by a local man named Hồ Khanh; He was never found again for the next 18 years.
Finally, in 2009, a team from the British Cave Research Association succeeded in uncovering the cave’s vegetated entrance, documenting the cave’s impressive size.
Phong Nha-Ke Bang park on the Vietnamese coast has more than 150 limestone caves and underground chambers, many of which remain unexplored. Most of the park’s cave systems are interconnected and form a total system of 200 kilometers.
Son Doong’s passages have a volume of 38.4 million cubic meters, a length of 9 kilometers and a width of 198 meters, so wide that a Boeing 747 can fly straight. Despite the forest being densely covered with vegetation, even the entrance to the cave is an impressive 50 meters high.
Inside is a fast-flowing river that gave rise to the formation of the cave over hundreds of thousands of years. During the rainy season this river overflows and fills the vast system, making it inaccessible.
Also, this cave is home to some impressive stalagmites, including the world’s largest stalagmite at 70 meters high, called the “Hand of the Dog”.
Along with the incredible atmosphere of the cave, the two large sinkholes have created skylights along the normally pitch-black passages that allow the forest above to spill deep into the cave. The smaller of these windows, called “Beware of Dinosaurs,” is believed to have formed as a result of the forest floor becoming too dense and collapsing in the last 500,000 years.
The larger “Garden of Edam” is 163 meters long and has a much thicker forest floor. The trees in this sinkhole exceed 30 meters in height and can often cause cave explorers to get lost in the thick bushes and be disoriented.
Birds, monkeys and snakes live in this sinkhole. Because many of the area’s species are on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, the caves are thought to offer hope for these populations and perhaps some yet to be discovered species.
A pristine passage that doesn’t experience the same rainy season flood as the rest of the cavern awaits, filled with perfectly preserved 400-million-year-old fossils.
The full splendor of this impressive cave was mapped by National Geographic in 2010, and you can take a full virtual tour of the cave online. However, only 30 percent of the entire cave system is thought to have been discovered.
In 2019, a team of British divers set out to explore the cave’s underwater passages. About 120 meters under the water, they discovered another tunnel that connects to the cave and stretches for 1 kilometer. This finding showed that the already gigantic cave was at least 1.6 million cubic meters larger than previously thought.
Experts are still trying to determine where the innermost water flows, and this is why some researchers believe there is an even larger, unexplored connected cave.
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