Reaching down into the bowels of the earth a distance equivalent to six Eiffel Towers, Veryovkina Cave in the Arabika Massif of western Georgia, close to the shores of the Black Sea, has an official overall depth of 2,212 metres – or, put another way, that’s more than 1.5 times the height of Ben Nevis, the highest mountain in the British Isles.
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The Veryovkina Cave currently holds the Guinness World Record for the world’s deepest cave, although it is very close in depth to the only other cave in the world with a depth of more than 2,000 metres – Krubera Cave, found in the same mountain range. This cave used to hold the record at around 2,197 metres.
In 2024, an expedition measured the depth of Krubera Cave from the entrance to the very bottom, taking into account the underwater part, and estimated the depth to be 2,224 meters, which would make it slightly deeper than Veryovkina. But, according to official records, the Veryovkina Cave still holds the title.
How was the Veryovkina Cave formed?
Like many of the world’s most spectacular caves, Veryovkina Cave has been formed from limestone, with the entire Arabika Massif a huge mountain of limestone karst through which water has been finding its way (because limestone dissolves in water) for millions of years – the rock was laid down in the Upper Jurassic and Lower Cretaceous periods, so between 160-100 million years ago.
How was Veryovkina Cave discovered?
It was first discovered in 1968, when Russian cavers descended 115 metres, while in the 1980s, a team from Moscow went down 440 metres. It was around this time that it was given the name Veryovkina after a caver called Alexander Veryovkin who died while exploring it in 1983. It wasn’t until 2015 that the shaft that leads the way to its greatest depth was discovered.
The record-breaking depth was announced in 2017 as 2,204 metres and then extended to 2,212 metres a year later.
A Russian caving team reached the bottom of Veryovkina Cave in March 2018 during a 12-day expedition. A later foray into the cave nearly ended in catastrophe when a pulse of floodwater triggered by heavy rain nearly cut off the explorers and stranded them at the very bottom.
National Geographic photographer Robbie Shone recalls hearing the roar of the waters as they plummeted towards them, with their surroundings trembling as if being rocked by an earthquake.
“The most enormous torrent of white water appeared out of this hole,” Shone recalls. His colleague, Petr, turned white, and Shone remembers thinking, “We have to leave right now. We cannot wait. If we just hang around, we’re all going to die.”
In another article for the Base Mag website, Shone describes how – rather like climbing a peak such as Everest – it is necessary to descend to the depths by a series of intermediate camps, at 600 and 1,350 metres, before getting to the final one at 2,100 metres. On average, it takes eight hours between each stage.
Climbing back up Veryovkina to escape the potential death trap that was pouring down from above was a terrifying experience.
“I don’t know whether I was more scared about the rising water behind, or the torrent of water coming down on our heads,” Shone writes. “The only way to breathe while climbing up through the waterfalls was to keep our heads down, put our chins on our chest, and create a small air space underneath the front of the helmet.”
What wildlife lives in the Veryovkina Cave?
Apart from the cave’s record-breaking dimensions, it’s also remarkable for some of its living inhabitants, including the deepest-ever terrestrial arthropod ever found, a millipede otherwise known as Leucogeorgia profunda, which has been collected from as far down as 2.2km.
Animals living this far down and completely cut off from any sunlight evolve into strange, alien creatures. This report in the International Society for Myriapodology Newsletter of November 2020 explains how the “highly modified mouthparts” of a number of species in the Leucogeorgia genus are very probably adapted for filtering food from water, with some species even spotted in the water.
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Other so-called troglobionts – animals adapted for life deep underground – known to inhabit Veryovkina include springtails, amphipods (aquatic crustaceans), freshwater shrimps and harvestmen.
Top image: Caver Pavel Demidov of Perovo-speleo (Moscow, Russia) team is going up the Babatunda pit, the biggest (155m) pit of the cave Veryovkina. Credit: Petr Lyubimov, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
