Lechuguilla Cave

The past month has been fun for me in many ways, but one of those has been recording the Planet Earth Series on Discovery HD Theater. I have been taking the chance to watch a little bit each day during lunch, and yesterday I got to finish up the series with the final episode. It was on caves, and my thought before watching it was it will be good but not great. Of course this was my thought for the majority of the episodes before watching them, but as I would watch I would be completely overwhelmed by the beauty and the magnitude of what they captured on film. Some of it I had seen before, but it had been staged. Take for instance a great white shark breaching as it takes a seal. I have seen this before, but it was not a real seal, it was a dummy seal being dragged behind the boat so they would know where to film. This series though used new technology to allow continuous filming so they could catch the real thing. It was rather impressive to see such a powerful animal come 15 feet out of the water to get some food. There were also some other incredible scenes like the massive dust storms in the Sahara, or the saddening footage of a pride of lions killing an elephant at night (once again new technology to help film in the dark), or even the sight of a parasitic fungus killing an ant (which I am still somewhat confused about how they filmed this because it had to take a while).

One of the ones that really caught me off guard was in the cave's episode. It was the segment on the Lechuguilla Cave system in New Mexico. The clip I have for you will not be anywhere near as good as in HD, but it is still worth your time. What I found really cool was the part that looks like Superman's crystal cave. You see that in the movies, but you never think that something like that could really exist.