Found in Abkhazia, Georgia, Krubera cave is the deepest cave on Earth, measuring a depth of 7,208 feet (2,197 m). Since it’s the only cave that surpasses the 2,000-meter mark, it has been given the title the ‘Entrance to Inner Earth’.
The cave in the Arabika massif has two branches: one is measured at 1,300, while the other, which has several smaller slopes, is at 2,197 meters. Anyone who’s planning to go on a deep adventure can do so with an available map to Krubera-Voronya.
A group of Georgian explorers found the cave in 1960. At that time, it had a depth of 180 meters.
In 1980, an expedition headed by Russian-Polish explorers led to the discovery of three caves in the massif: the Siberian cave, the Henrich grave and the Berchil cave. In 1999, Yury Kasyan led an expedition, the Ukrainian Speleological Associations (Ukr. S.A.) and the team discovered and explored two branches of the cave. One called the “Main Branch” measured at 740 meters and the other, the Nekuybyshevskaya Branch, had a depth of 500 meters.
The same team continued to explore the cave at 1200m in August 2000.
In September of the same year, the UkrSA and MTDE team up to continue exploring the cave, which was already at 1410 meters.
By January 2001, the UkrSA explored further to a depth of 1,710 meters or 5,610 feet, a depth that made Krubera the world's deepest cave.
Cavers from Ukraine were not the only ones who took part in the explorations.
Explorers from Russia, Bulgaria, France, United Kingdom, Ireland, Spain, Russia, Israel, Lithuania and Moldova have also joined in the fun.
In August to September of 2009, Kasyan's expedition team once again explored the cave further to 1,557 meters.
It was in August 2012 that Krubera’s deepest part was explored. There was a team of 59 explorers who went down to find out more about the cave in 27 days. Different teams had set up underground camps inside the cave.
Gennadiy Samokhin was the one to reach a new depth record at 2,197 meters.