Meghalaya's Caves Are A Treasure Trove Of Unique Flora And Fauna

The unique caves of Meghalaya hold many secrets and provide a glimpse of Earth’s past.

- Anupam Bordoloi in Shillong

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.