Two Canadian amateur explorers discovered 15,000-year-old caves just 30 feet underneath the surface of Montreal, it was revealed on Tuesday.
The explorers used drills and hammers to bust through ancient limestone walls of an existing cave, revealing a much bigger network of caverns that had never been seen by humans before.
When the explorers poked their heads through the wall, they saw a spacious, 200-meter long, thee-meter wide cave with ceilings that reach about 20 feet high and a lake.
‘Normally you have to go to the moon to find that kind of thing,’ Daniel Caron, one of the explorers, told The Canadian Press.
It was Caron and his friend, Luc Le Blanc, who made the historic discovery.
Cave explorer Daniel Caron points to a wall of a cave under a park in Montreal
It was Caron and his friend, Luc Le Blanc, who discovered 15,000-year-old caves just 30 feet underneath the surface of Montreal
The limestone walls and passages are lined with stalactites, a formation of rock that hangs from ceilings and are caused by thousands of years of dripping water
The limestone walls and passages are lined with stalactites, a formation of rock that hangs from ceilings and are caused by thousands of years of dripping water.
‘This is a major discovery we made. This doesn’t happen many times in a lifetime,’ Le Blanc told the CBC.
The cave is so deep that it reaches the aquifer.
The water reaches almost 15 feet deep in some areas, forcing the explorers to use an inflatable canoe.
The only way to reach the caves is to crawl on hands and hands through muddy tunnels, scaling latters, and edging along narrow passages.
The explorers used drills and hammers to bust through ancient limestone walls of an existing cave, revealing a much bigger network of caverns that had never been seen by humans before
‘Normally you have to go to the moon to find that kind of thing,’ said Caron
According to Caron, the chambers he discovered were first formed thousands of years ago during the last ice age
That was when the pressure of massive glaciers split the rock beneath the surface
The cavern also includes a lake that is 15-feet deep in some parts as well as stalactites that are thousands of years old
‘They built the street over the cave and they never found the cave,’ Francois Gelinas, the director of Quebec’s speleological society, told The Canadian Press
According to Caron, the chambers he discovered were first formed thousands of years ago during the last ice age.
That was when the pressure of massive glaciers split the rock beneath the surface.
The caves are underground and are only accessible through drilling.
‘They built the street over the cave and they never found the cave,’ Francois Gelinas, the director of Quebec’s speleological society, told The Canadian Press.
Gelinas said that there is no technology available to detect the presence of caverns.
‘Underground excavation is the only thing on the planet where there is no scientific, technical or technological means of knowing if there are caverns, and whether they are large or small,’ he said.
The existence of an underground lake could necessitate the deployment of divers.