Pictures and full story at:
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42227846
and
http://www.cbc.ca/news/multimedia/explore-the-huge-secret-cave-that-lay-hidden-under-montreal-1.4431920
At the end of the last ice age, glaciers rapidly receded across Canada,
putting so much pressure on the land below that solid rock split apart.
Perhaps nowhere is that more evident than a newly discovered cave system
some 20 feet below Montreal, Quebec. Suspecting that a cave beneath a
Montreal park expanded wider and deeper than anyone knew, Luc Le Blanc
and Daniel Caron of the Quebec Speleological Society dug through soft
limestone in October and found the "incredible" chamber, per theCBC
<http://www.cbc.ca/news/multimedia/explore-the-huge-secret-cave-that-lay-hidden-under-montreal-1.4431920>.
On the other side was a network of caves stretching the length of two
football fields. It was shaped roughly 10,000 years ago as rock was
pulled apart by glaciers, evident in rock wall outcrops that would fit
like puzzle pieces into those across the expanse, littered by
stalactites and stalagmites formed over millennia.
As Le Blanc tells theBBC
<http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42227846>, it's "the kind of
discovery you make once in a lifetime." But it wasn't without
challenges. Once through the limestone ceiling of the network, Le Blanc
and Caron traversed a rock wall and found themselves at the end of a
sloping passageway halted by deep water. "The walls are perfectly
vertical. It's just beautiful," Le Blanc says, per the CBC. "The walls
just opened through the pressure of the glacier above about 15,000 years
ago," he adds, though officials put the date at 10,000 years ago. Le
Blanc and Caron have since used a boat to explore all but 50 yards of
the cave network./National Geographic/
<https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/12/cave-discovery-montreal-st-leonard-ice-age-spd/>reports
they're waiting until February, when the water table lowers, to explore
it in full. That's something the public will also be able to do, once
efforts are made to protect the stalactites and stalagmites, per the CBC.
Shrink
This 20-foot-high cave network has just been found beneath Montreal,
Quebec. (Quebec Speleological Society)
Lee Skinner
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