On espeleobloc, you can read  an article published in Science, which is about how caves of Mallorca show the marks of a 20m sea level drop of the Mediterranean Sea between 85.400 and 76.600  bc.

Europe’s largest bat colony during wintertime is situated in a cave in (Romania – the editor) Trascau Mountains (center-west) called ‘Huda Lui Papara’, where nine species of bats are hibernating, according to researches made by biologists of Cluj-Napoca.

President of the Sfinx Girda de Sus Speleological Association, Christian Ciubotarescu said in a news release that last winter as many 84,000 bats hibernated in the cave, whereas the second largest hibernacula is situated in Poland, where 22,000 bats hibernate. According to the studies made by professor dr. Ioan Coroiu of the Faculty of Biology with Babes-Bolyay University of Cluj-Napoca, most bats originate from four species, although there are bats of nine species in the cave.

The cave is situated in Salciua locality, being the longest of Trascau Mountains, Mount Bedeleu, at an altitude of 567 metres. Since 1979 speleology club ‘Polaris’ Blaj has been exploring and recharting the cave, managing to include it into the tourist circuit, however it was partially destroyed because high floods in 1986. In 2002 Polaris again committed to design the cave for visitors by a European Union-funded programme in cooperation with Albamont Association.(original here)

Virtual spelunking” finds possible cave system in Martian volcano flows

A series of depressions discovered on Mars could be entrances to a cave system that might provide shelter for future Mars missions or shed light on whether microbial life forms have ever existed on the “Red Planet.”

Glen Cushing, a physicist with the US Geological Survey, discovered the series of “collapse depressions” in extinct lava flows from a Martian volcano. Cushing describes his discovery as a collection of “long grooves” in the surface with distinctive depressions that appear to be skylight entrances into tunnel-like structures. Some of the grooves are more than 100 kilometers long and could easily extend much further and deeper beneath the surface. Some of the grooves are about 50 to 60 meters wide and are curvy and meandering while others are more linear and 2-3 times wider, suggesting that more than one formation mechanism may have been operating.
Read on: http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=2330

original from cavechat.org

• The pathogen is present in the 27 species on the peninsula

A virus whose genetic sequence is quite homologous to the Ebola virus, which until now was restricted to certain African countries, have been found among the 27 species of bats live in caves of Spanish territory. The researcher of the Institute of Health Carlos III de Madrid, Ana Isabel Negredo, today moved the “important discovery” during the closing conference of the Third International Course on Emerging Zoonoses and Pathogens of Public Health Importance. The increased mortality among some populations of bats in the Iberian Peninsula took a team of researchers from the Instituto de Salud Carlos III to study possible causes, taking into account that, in 2005, Africa had appeared in the first case of virus Ebola that is living in a bat.

“Bats in Africa and the bats that live in Spain are very different,” said Ana Negredo, adding that for this reason, the team of researchers began to genetically sequence the virus found in bats in northern Iberian Peninsula ” was a great surprise to discover African Ebola-like compounds. The sequencing of the gene for this new virus is not yet complete, since to do so, you need an insulation that currently can not be performed in any laboratory in Spain. For this reason, it is negotiating with the Pasteur Institute, with appropriate facilities. “At present, our suspicion is that there is a pathogenic virus,” said the specialist. The Ebola virus, discovered in Africa in 1976, is one of the most aggressive known today, as it can kill a person within a few days for hemorrhagic fevers. On the African continent, has destroyed whole tribes. Original at FEDESPELEO.COM

http://www.bgr.de/app/fishy/ihme1500/

Geology map of Europe 1 : 5 000 000 scale

http://www.bgr.de/karten/IGME5000/IGME5000.htm

Limestone outcrops over the world :

http://www.sges.auckland.ac.nz/research/karst.shtml

original here

forum here

the article, and the suggested equipement for digital cave surveying

An interesting article by Bill Chadwick, about how to put cave surveys on Google Earth API, here. The page demonstrates how to use Microsoft Research’s (MSR) MapCruncher to generate custom tile sets from cave surveys for use by the Google Map API.

Péter Estók of the Max-Planck-Institute for Ornithology, Germany, first saw a bat being captured by a tit in a Hungarian cave in 1996. Ten years later, he and fellow bat ecologist Björn Siemers recorded 18 examples of pipistrelle bat predation by great tits, over the course of two winters in the same cave in the Bükk Mountains.

Bat hunting

The birds seek out bats as they wake from hibernation and usually eat them in the cave, though sometimes they carry them to a nearby tree.”The birds don’t kill the bats before they start eating them,” says Siemers, “but the bats eventually die when the birds peck open their brain case.”

As the bats are still very cold, only a degree above ambient temperature, they are extremely slow and easy for the birds to subdue. Nevertheless, it is a considerable feat for the tits given that a pipistrelle weighs approximately 5 grams and a great tit only four times as much.

See original here…