Journey Into Amazing Caves Page #3

So he purges the

walls of loose ice,

to protect the team

members who will follow.

Sometimes to set ice

screws in the safest spot,

Janot turns himself

into a human pendulum.

Assisting Janot on the descent,

Luc is concerned

about dripping water ...

icing up the rope at 200 ft.

I have rappeled under hundreds

of vertical pits around the world,

but never anything like this.

Ice adds an element

of unpredictable risk.

At just over 500 ft.,

Janot grows increasingly concerned

about the instability of the ice.

This is the second deepest ice

cave Janot has ever explored.

As Hazel rappels,

Janot radios up and warns

her not to descend too far.

Instead, he will bring

her the deepest sample.

A large block of ice above

Janot seems ready to break loose.

He wastes no time in collecting

the samples for Hazel ...

before starting the

long climb back out.

Perhaps the microbes Janot

risked his life for ...

will one day offer

a cure for disease.

But it will take years of

research to unlock that secret.

Some extremophiles can

stay out here for 100 years,

but I have found a few

weeks was quite my limit.

I knew I would miss my

new French friends though.

When you go caving with someone,

you trust your life to them ...

and they to you,

you become friends for life.

The hills near my

home in Georgia ...

are ideal terrain for

the formation of caves.

Just as extremophiles thrive

in the ice cap of Greenland,

bats are well adapted to

classic limestone caves.

These flying mammals sleep all

day and come out at sunset to feed.

are endangered,

but not this colony.

The 20 million bats here eat a half

a million pounds of insects every night.

Thanks to special training,

Nancy can introduce

her class to this ...

under appreciated creature

on a field trip.

Any questions?

What to do bats eat?

Well, this kind of

bat eats, scorpions.

Do you believe that?

I wouldn't want to eat

a scorpion, would you?

And bats eat a lot of insects too,

they get rid of those nasty

mosquitoes that bite your legs,

make you itch.

Like bats, serious cavers will

go a long way to find a good cave.

So when Hazel invited me on another

far flung search for extremophiles,

I was raring to go.

Southern Mexico,

the Yucatan peninsula

juts defiantly into the Gulf.

These ancient Mayan temples ...

were built on one huge

limestone plateau.

The plateau holds hundreds

of miles of cave passage,

the longest underwater

cave system in the world.

The caves are entered

through cenotes,

natural wells.

How did it go, did you

all find anything?

Hey kids, I'm still down

here in Mexico with Hazel,

and we are looking for something

called a halocline.

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