Exploring Caves: Story

Jenny and Carlos Get Out of the Rain
Chapter Four: Water and Cave Sculptures

Jenny and Carlos felt refreshed from their lunch break in the Bateteria. They scrambled up a pile of loose slippery boulders. At the top, an entrance took them into another cave room.

Jenny moved the flashlight beam about the room. "Look!" she said. Instead of boulders, this room was crowded with those pointy-shaped stone tree stumps that looked like soft ice cream. Only this room was like a forest of the strange rocks. "It's like a museum of weird sculptures."

Icicle-shaped rocks hung from the ceiling. On the cave walls, the rocks rippled and draped like curtains. Here and there flower-like crystals grew, while others stuck out like strange spirals of funnel cake you buy at the fair. "It's magic," Carlos said. "I've never seen anything like this."

Drops of water hit rock formations everywhere, "drip! drip! drip!"

"Bat," asked Carlos, "what are those things called, again?"

Bat was resting, hanging upside down from a crystal on the wall. He flew to the icicle shapes hanging from the ceiling. "These are stalactites", he said. "The ones on the floor . . . those are stalagmites."

Carlos complained. "Bat, do you have to use such big words? Why are cave words so hard?"

Bat admitted they were hard words. He said that the big words were made up by humans and had been used for a long time. "But the cave explorers use a silly rhyme to remember which is which."

"Well, tell us the rhyme," Jenny demanded.

"The stalactite holds tight . . ."

"I know!" Jenny cried. "Hold tight . . . they're the ones that hold tight on the ceiling! Right?"

"Right. So stalagmites are the guys growing up from the ground. Cute little "mites.""

Jenny agreed. Some of the stalagmites actually looked like little baby rock formations. The children practiced the rhyme together.

"The stalactite holds tight, and the stalagmite's a cute little mite."

With the rhyme in her head, Jenny turned the flashlight beam overhead. She wondered if she would see another bat colony, but no small shapes were hidden between the rocks. Some of the stalactites looked like soda straws. They were white and hollow, and water dripped down from their tips.

"We should call these soda straw stalactites," she said to Carlos. Bat agreed. "That's exactly what the cave explorers call them."

"Bat, what do you mean the stalactites 'grow'?" asked Carlos, looking at a big stalagmite in front of him. "These are rocks, not plants."

"They grow, but they're not alive like a plant or animal. They get bigger really slowly. In fact, that stalagmite in front of you probably took ten thousand years to get that big. Just a teeny bit every year."

"How do they grow if they're not alive?" Carlos wondered.

"If this was a dry cave, they wouldn't grow here. But this is a wet cave, with water dripping all the time, said Bat. Each drop of water brings a tiny bit of rock. The rock is dissolved, like sugar is dissolved in your tea. When the water dribbles down the rock, it leaves the dissolved rock behind. The stalactite gets longer, or the stalagmite gets a little taller. The rock formations grow bigger, day by day and year by year."

"And those soda straws. You can see the drips that fall through all the time. When the water gets to the end of the straw, it leaves some of that dissolved rock on the tip. That's how the straws get longer and longer."

"Carlos! Bat! Look here!" Jenny called. "Some soda straws are broken. They've fallen to the ground like a broken glass!"

The two children looked at the broken soda straw stalactites. It took thousands of years, Carlos thought. He felt sad to see the delicate rocks destroyed forever. Magic gone.

Bat started fluttering around the cave room. "Flap, flap, flap", his tiny wing-beats echoed angrily though the cave. He squeaked so fast that they couldn't understand him. Slowly he calmed down. He finally rested, hanging from the ceiling, his leathery wings drooping, panting little bat pants.

"What's the matter, Bat?" Carlos asked.

"Sometimes I get so upset at humans. I know there are nice humans like you, but some humans do bad things. I like those soda straws so much, and somebody came in here and broke them. It wasn't the cave explorers, just some other people who wandered in. The cavers are really careful and always take their garbage. Except when they lose something like the flashlight."

"And it will take thousands of years to grow the soda straws again," added Carlos. He moved the flashlight beam around the cave.

On the other side of the room, he spotted a small pile of garbage. Together they collected two pop cans, potato chip bags, and plastic sandwich bags.

"Let's take the garbage out, Carlos," suggested Jenny. "It doesn't belong in a cave." They put the garbage in their backpacks with their own lunch trash. Jenny looked the area over carefully with the flashlight until they found every last piece of garbage.

"Let's leave this apple core," whispered Jenny. "It looks like the troglobites were already eating."

She looked up and gasped. On the wall, the thoughtless visitors had scrawled their names in spray paint. "Freddie and Jane Wur Heer, 1996", it said. Jenny was shocked. "It's ugly, and they can't even spell right. They made this magical place ugly." She put her head on Carlos' shoulder. "It's sad," she said quietly.

"I'm so sorry Bat, " Jenny said. "I'm not going to tell anybody where this cave is after we get back. Will that help?"

"Yes Jenny, it will. It would be better if only cavers came here. Real cave explorers would only tell other responsible cavers. Or tell people if someone was going to build a house on top of a place that would cave in. Then they would tell to prevent accidents."

Once again, they heard the bat's "flap, flap, flap" as he flew around the cave."Hey! Let's get moving, he squeaked. We'll be late for supper if we don't get going."

Carefully they walked between the stalagmites and dodged the low-hanging stalactites. Their good spirits returned. Bat flew toward a shadow where another tunnel led out of the soda straw room. He told them to turn off the flashlight to save energy. Jenny shut her eyes for a moment and gave thanks that they could stand up in this tunnel.

They turned off the flashlight to save battery power. Carefully they walked into the darkness again. As they left the room behind, Carlos wondered to himself: If nobody could see something ugly, did it matter?

All USGS teaching packets are based on National Education Standards.

Make limestone caves paper models.

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