The unique caves of Meghalaya hold many secrets and provide a glimpse of Earth’s past.
Eerie shadows dance on the walls as a sliver of light from the mobile phone reflects off the underground stream. Bats flutter out of crevices in a mass of flapping wings, their high-pitched shrieks magnified in the claustrophobic passage. Heart pounding, you reach out to the nearest wall for support when you feel something crawling up your arm. A cave can be a scary place. it can even be dangerous place. But it is also a breathtakingly beautiful place, a subterranean paradise where art and science fuse to form some of the most extraordinary images and structures. it is a photographer’s delight. A living laboratory for scientists.
It was into such a cavern—Krem Mawmluh—in Meghalaya that legendary caver Brian Dermot Kharpran Daly and Ashish Sinha, a paleoclimatologist from the California State University, went down on a bitter cold February afternoon in 2003. When they emerged several hours later, they were holding a piece of stalagmite which would one day throw new light on Earth’s evolution and give the northeastern state a unique badge of honour—the Meghalayan, the new geological age ratified in July by the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS), the geological timekeeper.
This story is from the September 10, 2018 edition of Outlook.
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This story is from the September 10, 2018 edition of Outlook.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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