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Birds on the Dyfi
Acute toothache meant plans for spending the weekend underground in Daren Cilau had to be shelved. It did however leave Hollie and I free to visit the wildlife reserves next to the Dyfi estuary on Sunday. We first dropped in to the Dyfi Osprey Project to see how the new …
Read moreMendip misery
A trip down the Technical Masterpiece in Eastwater Cavern is probably some of the gnarliest caving you can do on Mendip, and certainly not a place you would hope to get rescued from. It's less than 300 metres long, however the tight passage is a real test of caving technique …
Read moreWhat are the Russians hiding?
There are not many places that Google Earth don't allow the public to view, but in a remote section of Russia's Far East one small section of mountains in Chukotka has been intentionally blurred. On Yahoo Maps the scene is similarly hidden from sight, this time with a more blatant …
Read moreMoel Fferna and the Bridge of Death
On a weekend away in North Wales with the ACC last weekend, we decided to visit the Moel Fferna Slate Quarry. Much of the working here was done entirely underground, operating on seven levels. When the mine closed all adits were sealed, leaving only a ventilation shaft for access. This …
Read moreThe Blue Greenies
All the large caves in Wales are renowned for a particular formation, usually hidden away in the far reaches of the system. In Draenen there's The Geryon, Aggy's is the Courtesan, and in Daren Cilau there are the Blue Greenies. The journey to see these uniquely colourful speleothems however is …
Read moreLake Vostok Reached
Reports are circulating that the Russian team drilling into Lake Vostok have finally reached their target, just in time before the onset of the Antarctic winter. The total depth drilled through the ice sheet stands at 3,768 metres, though this information is still yet to be confirmed. Lake Vostok has …
Read morePumlumon Fawr
Although it was pretty cold and dry for the last week, Ingo and I suffered the elements quite heavily on our hike up Pumlumon Fawr yesterday. Not that it dampened spirits at all - the walk is a pretty good one, with plenty of variation and also away from the …
Read moreWhy go caving?
As I was driving down to south Wales to spend another weekend 'digging' in Daren Cilau, I suddenly had an objective realisation: I'm going to spend a large chunk of my free time moving some sand from one place to another in a hole that perhaps very few people will …
Read moreNext Ice Age on hold
A study recently published in Nature Geoscience has suggested that due to current atmospheric concentrations of CO2, the next ice age will fail to materialise on time. The authors used past interglacials as analogies to the present, and by assuming that ice growth mainly responds to insolation and CO2 forcing predicted our …
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