Hidden Earth 2024

Achik Kol - Uncharted Caves of South Garo Hills

45 minute Film|Thomas Arbenz

Abstract

A video documentary covering CORE GEO-EXPEDITIONS' 2024 caving expedition in South Garo Hills, Meghalaya, NE-India. During a period of three weeks a team of 16 cavers from UK, Romania, Switzerland and India explored and surveyed 52 caves with a total of 12.7km of passage.
Core Geo-Expeditions is a non-profit research organisation dedicated to exploring the subterranean landscape and its related aspects with a scientific mindset. The organisation supports and facilitates surveyors, researchers and explorers in creating cross disciplinary portraits of the karst landscape and eventually contribute to a better understanding of our ecosystems.
In this context we hosted a team of Zoologists, specializing on bats. They were able to capture 64 bats of 24 different species, one of which has the potential of being new to science.
The most import find of the expedition was the discovery of an Archaeocetus fossil by Geologist Tudor Tamas and his team in one of the surveyed caves. Palaeonthologists identified the fossil, of which one jaw, two fangs and two molars are visible, as "possibly Ambulocetus" - a key species of the whale between terrestrial and aquatic mammal.
The expedition was based in the upper Chibe Valley, north west of Siju in South Garo Hills. The Chibe is cutting through layers of the Siju limestone and Tura sandstone. Near Tolegre (our base camp) the river disappears trough various small sink holes in its bed to re-appear again 25km further south. A good number over 20 sinkholes were explored and surveyed in order to find access to the master cave below the river: a goal yet to be achieved ...