Journey into Amazing Caves

Our universe seems a barren place ...

full of extreme conditions hostile to living things.

Our own planet has such extreme environments.

Places where, until recently, we believed nothing could survive.

Yet life is tenacious if it can just get a foothold.

We call the tiny organisms living in such inhospitable places extremophiles ...

microbes which thrive in the harshest of conditions.

Caves, long dismissed as dark and lifeless deserts,

turn out to be ideal homes for these hardy life forms.

Their scientific potential appears vast.

This underground frontier ...

holds an irresistible attraction for two courageous young women.

The Arizona desert,

bone-dry and scorching-hot.

Perfect for extremophiles.

Nancy Aulenbach and Hazel Barton ...

are part of a small team exploring unmapped caves ...

near the Grand Canyon.

The rest of the team, Gordon Brown and Scott Davis,

search for other caves.

Hazel and Nancy are almost certainly the first cavers to explore this cave.

To get here they rappeled 300 ft. in 112 degree heat.

Nancy Aulenbach from Georgia is the team's technical specialist.

As an instructor in cave rescue techniques,

Nancy's rope skills are finely honed.

At 98½ pounds, she is well suited for rescuing cavers stuck in very tight places.

In unexplored caves we always do surveys.

Later my husband will use our data to draw the very first map of this cave.

He is a caver.

In fact, I come from an entire family of cavers.

Hazel Barton, a native of England has a PhD in Microbiology.

I found crystals which only form in still water.

This cave probably formed millions of years ago.

While Nancy studies the cave wall with a magnifying glass,

Hazel collects samples of tiny organisms ...

which could help cure serious diseases.

You are never sure what speck of dust might contain the secret to a new medicine ...

that could save lives.

Often, the most dangerous part of exploring caves is just getting to them.

Gordon will vouch for that.

What turns this river so blue is dissolved limestone.

The limestone is gradually re-deposited ...

to form travertine dams ...

which are first cousins to the stalagmites we see in caves.

All this blue water and travertine ...

is visible proof that caves are forming upstream right now.

I got time-off from my job as a teacher's assistant ...

because I promised to e-mail field reports back to my second-grade students.

Here is how Hazel described her research to my second-graders:

The tiny organisms called microbes that live in caves ...

might contain special chemicals that we could make medicine from.

You know caves are not only a place to visit,

they are a place where you can do a lot of research,

you can survey, you can do biological inventories,

you can find new species that people have never seen before.

I look for medically useful organisms everywhere,

even in scum ponds,

after all a rather useful medicine called penicillin ...

was found in the same mould that grows on rotting cheese.

You know, just collecting some more boogers, the smellier the better.

While we were on Navajo land,

Nancy and I heard about a medicine man ...

making a sand painting.

Through these sand paintings,

the Navajo believe that they can tap into the healing powers of the earth.

Of course that's what I do too,

I go deep into the earth in search of unknown cures.

We are using kayaks on this expedition ...

because the river is a good vantage point ...

for spotting unexplored caves on the cliff walls.

As my husband, Brent, says,

"if you aren't wet you aren't caving".

Some rivers run through caves for miles before bursting on to the surface,

but that's of little concern as you approach a precipice wondering ...

"is this a good idea?"

Unlike canyons, which are carved by fast moving rivers,

caves are formed by a subtler, but equally effective, force.

Most limestone caves start when groundwater picks up carbon dioxide in the air and soil.

As the mildly acidic water leaks through cracks in the earth's crust,

it dissolves the surrounding rock, leaving pockets,

caves.

That's how a chamber 300 ft. high can be carved from solid stone ...

in less than a million years.

Walls are decorated when trickling water-deposits dissolve stone ...

to form stalagtites, stalagmites and other flow-stone formations.

Since the purest water on earth is found deep in pristine caves,

sometimes we use rafts to explore,

which cause less contamination than swimming.

Cave decorations are as delicate as fine crystal,

easily shattered and impossible to repair.

That's why good cavers are trained to move gently underground.

When water leaves a residue of minerals,

they crystallise and gradually build up ...

to become delicate cave formations.

As Hazel and her colleagues in the lab have found,

extremophiles are tough.

We suspect that, because of the environment in which they live,

extremophiles produce potent chemical weapons.

If we can isolate these chemical compounds,

we can use them in the fight against disease.

Only the hardiest extremophiles could survive ...

deep in the ice of the North Pole.

To collect them,

Hazel and Nancy have joined an Arctic expedition ...

to Greenland.

Greenland's ice cap is massive.

If melted, it would raise the world's oceans 18 ft.

When I first saw camp and saw all these tiny specks out in the middle of nowhere,

you know I started thinking ...

"we are going to be here for awhile".

The expedition is led by Frenchman Janot Lamberton.

Janot has gone deeper into ice caves than anyone else alive.

In summer,

melting ice creates raging rivers,

which plunge into the caves,

cutting them deeper and deeper.

Heat from the sun can weaken ice.

These jumbled blocks were once the roof of a cave ...

just like the one we are about to venture into.

We started early so we wouldn't be inside when the roof collapsed.

Once I dropped into the cave,

I focused on how awesome it was to be ...

one of the first people to see that place.

The ice is alive and you can hear it creak and groan ...

as it all inches very slowly towards the sea.

The ice is a databank,

storing centuries of information for the team's glaciologist,

Dr Luc Moreau.

And also the ice is a memory of the climate.

You see different layer ...

a blue layer represent the summer ...

and white layer represent the winter,

so we can calculate the age of the ice here.

The glacier is truly a time capsule,

the deeper you go,

the more the seasonal layers are compressed.

Only 60 ft. down,

Hazel can collect samples which fell as snow,

centuries ago.

Err so far we so far found just bunches of different bacteria:

gram negative, gram positive, cocci, spyrokeets ...

all kinds of cool looking stuff,

and the thing is there's not much I can do with them here in the field,

the only thing I can do this freeze them down and take them back with me.

The bacteria Hazel wants most ...

lie buried beneath 500 ft. of ice.

The team cannot descend the deep until there is a four day cold snap ...

to stop the flow of water.

They soon get their wish.

The other day it was -12 centigrade with a windshield of -26 centigrade ...

which is colder than a freezer ...

so it was very cold, bitterly cold.

Big-time.

Too cold to be pleasant.

Waiting for the water to freeze up is the hardest part,

because we're out in the middle of an ice cap,

there's not a whole lot to do.

This is definitely a caver's haircut.

To prepare for the deep descent,

Nancy has to learn to measure the movement of the ice,

as the cave walls are slowly pushed in by the tremendous weight of the glacier.

Oh, so from this point to this point ...

is what we measure how it closes, okay.

Four days into the cold snap,

Janot decided to risk perhaps his deepest descent ever,

to get samples for Hazel.

Only days ago this was a deadly waterfall.

The deeper you go,

the more unstable the ice becomes.

Janot has seen ice boulders burst from the walls like cannon shots.

10 foot spears can break loose without warning.

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.