Workers Drilling in Romania Broke into a Cave Sealed for 5.5M Years

wpollock•about 2 hours ago

Just because the cave is sealed now, does not mean it has been sealed for millions of years. Even for geology, 5.5M years is a long time. I don't understand how they can claim it never had connections to the outside, just because it doesn't have connections now.

defrost•about 1 hour ago

Geology is most probably largely how the sealed claim has been made .. it was open to the world when the limestone was forming, formed (Speleogenesis) by sky water (rain) permeating down and eating out a limestone void, and "sealed" by thick and impermeable layers of clays and loess (windborne sediment) some 2.5 million years ago during the Quaternary.

There are also genetic drift estimates, which put the "last" outside species to enter at about that time (

  One of the most recent animals recorded is the cave's only species of snail, Heleobia dobrogica, which has inhabited the cave for slightly more than 2 million years.

~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movile_Cave )

bcraven•about 1 hour ago

"Combined with the geology and the peculiar chemistry of the cave’s water and air, the evidence pointed to a system that had been closed off since roughly five and a half million years ago."

defrost•about 1 hour ago

That quote, from the AI generated article, simple asserts the cave was sealed, it doesn't explain how the cave came to be sealed, nor how it is that modern humans infer the cave has been sealed and for how long.

pokpokpok•about 2 hours ago

Does anyone have the original source of this information? This article seems to be AI generated: https://www.pangram.com/history/fdf6dfd6-1a9c-4267-a90c-a3cf...

john_strinlai•about 2 hours ago

while looking at the wiki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movile_Cave), this popped up from 2015 from bbc earth: https://web.archive.org/web/20210531110415/https://www.bbc.c...

statictype•about 3 hours ago

Interesting that being sealed for 5 million years did not yield any life forms more complex than insects.

Maybe sun and space are importance factors for intelligence.

quuxplusone•11 minutes ago

That has a lot more to do with whether the cave started out containing anything "more complex than insects." 5 million years isn't, like, an evolve-monkeys-from-scratch number of years. It's arguably an evolve-humans-from-chimps number of years. But if your cave doesn't contain any chimps... or even if it does but they all starve to death in Year 2 out of 5,000,000...

weaksauce•about 2 hours ago

the sun is energy so i’d expect there to be a correlation there.

charlie0•about 1 hour ago

It's all fun and games until they run into another branch of homo sapiens ala the descent....

andrewstuart•about 2 hours ago

Great first line for a story.

cyberax•about 3 hours ago

> Oxygen levels run at roughly half of what our lungs expect. Carbon dioxide is present at concentrations enormously higher than in the outside atmosphere. The air is laced with hydrogen sulfide, the compound responsible for the smell of rotten eggs, and with methane and ammonia.

So it was not truly sealed. A truly sealed cave would have had no oxygen, it would have all been consumed in reactions with methane.

dyauspitr•about 3 hours ago

Yeah it has significant groundwater inflow (like 5L/s). Nothing about this is sealed.

john_strinlai•about 2 hours ago

>Yeah it has significant groundwater inflow (like 5L/s).

where did it say this? i did a double-take because the article says the opposite, and i checked the wikipedia and didnt see it there either. is there another source of info? or am i being blind?

dyauspitr•14 minutes ago

> Mesothermal, sulfidic groundwater (up to 1 mM in H2S) originating from an artesian sulfidic aquifer underlying the region enters at the bottom of the cave’s lower passages. This results in a constant flow occurring tens of centimeters to 1 m below the water surface at flow rates of about 5 L/s

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10672346/

Workers Drilling in Romania Broke into a Cave Sealed for 5.5M Years

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion (15 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews