Katabasis by Thor, Rin Brooker
April 21st, 2012 12:01 AMIn Alaska the cold bites to the bone and the earth is never soft, not even when the midnight sun withers the flora above ground.
Anyone who's ever lived in a place with winter can tell you a seasons piled up dog poo smells pretty strongly when it thaws in the spring. This goes doubly for mammoth poo that hasn't seen the light of day for 30,000 years and then gets dug up.
The Location
We got into a small tour of the permafrost tunnel in Alaska. It was made back in the 60s by the Army Corps of Engineers. It was for testing ways to dig into frozen ground, probably to find out the fastest way to build missile silos.
Thor with hardhat
We began our adventure into the frozen depths below Alaska cautiously. The coat was needed.
Rin With Hardhat
April 20th 2012
though the snow outside is mostly gone the ceiling of the cave entrance was coated with frost, preserved by the chill from below.
Danger
Hardhats were required as these caves are held up by nothing but the permanent ice.
The tunnel
The tunnel was filled with soft silty material called loess. Loess is silt blown by the wind from the Yukon river all the way to Fairbanks. It piles up over millions of years. You can see it on the lens.
The beginnng of the tunnel
This is a mamoth bone
And an attention hogging metal bar.
Ice, above our heads.
An Ice wedge
This is a cross section an icicle that grows underground.
An ancient vermin nest.
Down to the Depths
There's cave fungus on the walls.
The Classified section
Off in one of the side tunles near the end there was a section that was fenced off, sadly there was no way to squeeze through.
A frozen pond
See that red stuff, that's bacteria, and it's alive. It's a pond that drained into a hole in the ground then froze.
Spooky old miner table
The adventurers.
This was mostly Thor's idea. Welcome to SF0, future level 8.
a layer of dirt 32300 years old.
Rin with ice found in the tunnel
Awesome.
I made an attempt to visit some mines the other day... just from looking at my maps where the old shafts are. Turns out, there's something about digging underground that is easily overlooked when you think of old mines.