Malham Cave. (photo credit: ANTON CHIKISHEV / HEBREW UNIVERSITY)
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Israeli researchers discovered the world’s longest salt cave in Israel, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem reported Thursday. Malham Cave in the Dead Sea’s Mount Sedom at 10 kilometers long now bears this title.
An international expedition led by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HU)’s Cave Research Center (CRC), Israel Cave Explorers Club, and Bulgaria’s Sofia Speleo Club, along with 80 cavers from nine countries, recently completed mapping the cave.
“Thirty years ago, when we surveyed Malham, we used tape measures and compasses,” explained Prof. Amos Frumkin, director of the CRC at HU’s Institute of Earth Sciences. “Now we have laser technology that beams measurements right to our iPhones.”
This technology helped the team to determine the cave’s record-breaking, double-digit length.
Malham was initially discovered by the CRC back in the 1980’s. Later, tens of CRC expeditions surveyed Mount Sedom and found more than 100 different salt caves inside, the longest of which measured 5,685 meters. Subsequent carbon-14 tests dated the cave as 7,000 years old, give or take, and successive rainstorms created new passages for the cavers to explore.
This new record was only discovered when the international expeditions returned to Malham in 2018 and 2019. These most recent expeditions were supported by the Bulgarian Federation of Speleology, the Ministry of Youth and Sports in Bulgaria, the European Federation of Speleology (FSE) and its sponsors Aventure Verticale, Korda’s, Scurion and Bulgaria Air.
Malham is the world’s first salt cave to reach a length in the double-digits. Currently, the survey team is processing final data from the new Malham Cave surveys to create an electronic map of the cave and to publish its findings.
Geologically speaking, salt caves are living things, according to an explanatory release by Hebrew U. They form mostly in desert regions with salt outcrops. What helps them form is water—even arid climates see the occasional rainstorm. When it does rain, water rushes down cracks in the surface, dissolving salt and creating semi-horizontal channels along the way. After all the rainwater drains out, these dried out “river beds” remain and salt caves are formed.
“The Malham Salt Cave is a river cave,” said Frumkin. “Water from a surface stream flowed underground and dissolved the salt, creating caves – a process that is still going on when there is heavy rain over Mount Sedom about once a year.”
Mount Sedom is named after a location mentioned in the Bible. he Book of Genesis describes how Lot’s wife became a pillar of salt after she looked back at Sodom.
“Mapping Malham Cave took hard work,” said Efraim Cohen, a member of HU’s research team. “We cavers worked 10-hour days underground, crawling through icy salt channels, narrowly avoiding salt stalactites and jaw-dropping salt crystals. Down there it felt like another planet.”
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