How do you stay in touch with friends, family, and the outside world when you're almost a mile, Jules Verne-style, underground, exploring one of the deepest, most treacherous caves in the world?
When you're the US Deep Caving Team, slogging through subterranean passages where no one has slogged before, you turn to high-tech sponsors for help. The group convinced AT&T to provide 22 kilometers of Kevlar-reinforced fiber-optic cable as a link to the bowels of the earth for two-way voice and video communications during the 18-week project.
The cave's location is as remote as the project was ambitious. A 12-hour bus ride east of Mexico City on the Huautla Plateau leads to the tiny pueblo of San Agustin de Zaragoza. The village is perched on the rim of a vast sinkhole that drops away like a giant bathtub. At the bottom of the depression is a narrow entrance to the underworld - 72 kilometers of rugged passageways that make up what's believed to be the deepest, most extensive cave system yet discovered.
Communications below ground are key to survival. During a recent photo reconnaissance mission for National Geographic, half a dozen members of the team became trapped for several days nearly a mile underground when heavy rains drained into the sinkhole, creating unfordable 5-foot-high rapids in the cave's narrow passages. With a communications system intact, the team could have been warned of incoming inclement weather. But the might of AT&T's fiber optics, as it turned out, was no match for a machete-equipped Mazatec Indian community.
"The concept was great," says Bill Stone, standing on a mountain ridge overlooking the sinkhole and cave entrance. "We'd planned to have live video and a satellite uplink from here in the middle of nowhere beamed to living rooms around the world." Stone, a top engineer and inventor with the National Institute of Standards and Technology, had pieced together the entire expedition, combining the high technology of fiber optics and an advanced underwater rebreather system he invented with traditional mountain climbing know-how and the muscle of two dozen teammates.
As it turned out, whole kilometers of fiber-optic cable were slashed by the locals. A black wire strung through the jungle might anger the spirits of the cave, the peaceful Mazatecs thought. A few hacks with a machete was all it took to disconnect elaborate plans. "We have to figure out how to explain this to our sponsors," Stone says.
The interrupted communications didn't prevent the team from charting previously unexplored depths of the cave, however. On their next mission, the spelunkers hope to connect the deep Huautla tunnels with a resurgence spring several miles away.
ELECTRIC WORD
Deep, Dark, and Disconnected
