IRAN SALT CAVES 2018 Leonardo Piccini A patch of blue sky up above illuminates the rocky edges of the shaft. Regardless of whether it’s made of limestone, gypsum or quartzite: what counts is the blackness that opens up under the narrow terrace onto which I’m hanging, while my attention is entirely focused on finding a suitable place to anchor my rope. In general, you look for areas that jut out, which will keep the rope away from the rock and reduce the risk of it breaking. What I have in front of me, though, is not a wall of solid Apuan marble but an agglomeration of heterogenous, variegated blocks, held together by a friable sandy matrix. Here, the rock jutting out is a chunk that is about to detach itself and, as such, should be avoided at all costs. I use my hammer to produce a number of silent knocks, beating on the wall in front of me; finally I hear higher pitch knock, meaning that the rock id sufficiently solid. In the end, I decide to drill into a block of reddish rock, perhaps marl, that is well-recessed: for someone like me, who prefers “aerial” anchors, this is a real heresy, but there’s nothing better on offer here. Still not happy, I bang in another bolt slightly higher and I connect it to the first with a long tape, to which I then attach, using a carabiner, the rope coming out of the bag between my legs– there are way too many metres of darkness under my feet to attempt to descend with just one bolt, and a doubtful one at that. I push myself off and descend slowly, checking that the geometry of the anchoring is as expected and that the rope is not going to rub on some rocky ledge. Another few metres and I find myself hanging into the dark: the shaft opens into an enormous space, with threatening blocks of stone looming over me. Trusting that the saline cement will hold, I descend thirty or so metres until I glimpse a zebra-striped wall of salt. Hmmm… nothing
Rigging the initial shaft of a large sinkhole in the Konarsiah diapir
like the compact limestone of Palawan or the hard quartzite of the Tepuis here – we are in the south of Iran, where the caves are formed mostly of salt. The problem is that here, on the Konarsiah diapir, the rock salt does not surface; on the contrary, it is covered by a thick blanket of detritus and can only be found after descending a few dozen metres of unstable walls. Under that covering of detritus, though, the karstification must be intense and widespread, as evinced by the many absorption and collapse dolines that stud the upper areas of this diapir and others that we have seen quickly over recent days. The first time I saw Iran was in March 1989, from the window of a Pakistan Airlines Boeing 747 bound for Karachi, where another flight would then take me to Manila, in the Philippines. I was travelling alone, and I was due to meet up with a group of friends (some of whom would go on to found the association La Venta) on the island of Samar for a caving expedition. I recall that I had been fascinated by that desert land that scrolled by slowly before my eyes, where long ridges burned by the sun alternated with plains of sand, with just the odd dark patch of cultivation, where evidently there was some water to be found. I knew something about the country, having studied its geology in books – the Mount Zagros chain is one of the areas that comes up most often in geomorphology handbooks. Some of these ridges seemed to be of limestone, and the idea that they could play host to karstification and large underground systems inevitably emerged in my mind, but back then I was focused on the moist tropical caves that were awaiting me. For almost thirty years this remained my only experience of that magnetic country, overflowing with history. In the meantime, caving managed to get a foothold there,
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