The second deepest known cave on Earth at 2,209 metres, after Krubera on the same massif. The entrance is a hole three by four metres at 2,285 m altitude, dropping straight into a 32 metre shaft; at minus 400 there is a pit called Babatunda that goes 155 metres in one throw. Krasnoyarsk cavers found it in 1968, a 2015 breakthrough opened the way on, and by August 2017 it was at 2,151 metres, the same trip finding long horizontal tunnels which are not typical for the Arabika Massif. This is not a tourist cave and the entry says so plainly. A photography team in September 2018 barely got out ahead of a flood pulse from a rainstorm that filled the lower levels, and in 2020 the caver Sergei Kozeev became stuck in the permanently wet lower section and died of hypothermia, without the stirrups needed to climb out. Abkhazia, Georgia.
Arabika Massif, Abkhazia, Georgia
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