![]() ![]() Bechtel was quick to agree, noting the historical and scientific significance of the waterway. Sometime around 2008, one of the original spelunkers of the caves contacted Bechtel and asked him to search anew for the Lost River. "In fact, the water went in the direction of the river these early explorers said they had discovered," Bechtel said. Instead, it flowed west toward the Green River. It remained a mystery until the early 1980s, when a University of Kentucky researcher conducted a dye-tracing test in a sinkhole expecting the water to flow in an easterly direction. When they finally did return their attention to the mysterious river, the explorers could not find the slot they had stumbled upon. They intended to return and map the river, but in their larger mission to locate the connections that created what is now the Mammoth-Flint Ridge Cave System, the task was forgotten. They wriggled through the narrow opening into a large passage with a river. As explorers began finding passages that connected the caves, two spelunkers discovered a slot in a Mammoth Cave wall. Lost caves kentucky series#Until the late 1950s, the park was home to what was believed to be a series of independent caves - Flint Ridge Cave, Crystal Cave, Mammoth Cave, Colossal Cave and Bedquilt Cave. "It's almost certainly flowing through a cave passage." ![]() ![]() "We know that somewhere in the cave system there is water going in exactly the opposite direction it's supposed to be going," he said. In this case, it is a spring along the Green River, which winds its way through the middle of the national park, Bechtel said. Locally, underground waterways flow in an easterly direction, from a re-charge area - an area that replenishes groundwater - to an outlet. "There is a known flow-path through the Mammoth Cave system that takes water in a direction that is completely unexpected." "We're hunting for what is known as the Lost River," Visiting Professor of Geosciences Tim Bechtel said of his work at Central Kentucky's 52,800-acre Mammoth Cave National Park. The longest cave system in the world harbors a secret, one that a Franklin & Marshall College professor and his students have been working to uncover for the better part of four years. ![]()
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