Caves

A cool water droplet hit my forehead as I descended narrow stairs into the caves. An overwhelming smell — ammonia meets dirty feet — assaulted my nostrils. Chilly, stinky, damp. It was heaven. I had entered the caves of Roquefort ( rohk-FOR ), a village in the south of France and home to the world's most famous blue cheese. My love affair with Roquefort possibly began in the womb. My mother loved all things French, especially pungent cheeses. So I panicked last year when I saw a newspaper headline declaring: "U.S.

Buried under the mountains that encircle this bucolic farming village on the outskirts of Nagano lie vast and eerie relics of World War II, but many Olympic visitors may go home without ever knowing they are there. As Allied bombs began to pummel Tokyo in the waning days of the war, roughly 7,000 Korean slave laborers were brought here for a top-secret project.

Three Australian caves have yielded a treasure trove of fossils of ancient kangaroos, marsupial lions and giant lizards that roamed the outback for hundreds of thousands of years. These so-called megafauna went extinct about 45,000 years ago, shortly after humans arrived on the continent. Researchers, writing in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature, suggest that the extinction was the result of the human use of fire for hunting -- and not climate change, as some scientists have suggested.

Sanawbar Hussain had walked the path a hundred times, up the steep cliff from the cave where she makes her home. But this time, as she hurried to reach her crying baby one day last winter, she stepped on a land mine a few feet from the mouth of her cave. In one of the most remote corners of Afghanistan, in an area where displaced families live in caves carved in sandstone cliffs, Hussain managed to get emergency surgery at a tiny clinic run by the International Committee of the Red Cross.

A just-unearthed cave formed more than 1 million years ago could yield new insight into the geological history of the American West, according to scientists, who called the discovery a major find. Four amateur cave explorers uncovered the vast caverns, stretching more than 1,000 feet into a remote mountainside, in August. Visitors to the cave, dubbed Ursa Minor, described seeing millions of crystals that shimmered like diamonds lodged in its walls.

A veteran cave explorer who suffered a broken leg far inside the nation's deepest cave praised her rescue team Tuesday as the "hottest on the surface of the earth." "We said that wasn't quite correct," said Rick Bridges, head of the Lechuguilla Cave Project. "She has the hottest team under the surface of the earth."

Dr. Hazel Barton is a British biologist who travels the world collecting samples of rare microorganisms for use in scientific and medical research. Serious business when one considers the objects of her affections and the samples for her test tubes and petri dishes come from volcanoes at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean and from deep inside the hot springs at Yellowstone Park.

Eight Swiss social workers on a mission to test their mettle amid adversity spent a third night huddled on a chilly stone ledge in a cavern, still trapped today in an adventure-turned-nightmare as rising flood waters thwarted their rescue. Divers had reached the hapless spelunkers from Zurich on Friday morning, bringing in hot food and ferrying out news that they were alive to loved ones standing vigil in this verdant outdoor recreation center.

Protecting the beauty of a cave is a life's work for men like Jerry Trout. So if the husky federal ranger takes you "caving," be prepared to follow a deliberately circuitous route in the interest of preserving nature's underground glories. Take Thunder Mountain Cave, well hidden in a narrow canyon in the Huachuca Mountains of southeastern Arizona. With his bare hands, Trout sweeps aside a pile of leaves, strategically placed to conceal a set of weathered steel bars set in the ground.