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The
new tool was developed by Geo-CZ, a company that uses the
underlying technology to map historical and archaeological
sites. The Cave Administration of the Czech Republic premiered
it on Friday.
"The input data are not made by individual pictures, but
videos," Geo-CZ's Jiri Sindelar said. "This makes the on-site
mapping incredibly faster."
That means, of course, that somebody has to put on the gear and
go into the cave, but only once and only long enough to film it.
That is a great convenience, because caves are dark, confusing
places that are somewhat dangerous on their best day and
seriously dangerous when they're flooded.
Furthermore, the former can turn into the latter with no
warning, as those 12 Thai schoolboys found out last summer when
rain caused a flash flood in the cave they were exploring.
Geo-CZ used their system in Chynovska jeskyne, a cave about 100
kilometers (62 miles) south of Prague, that was discovered in
1863 and opened to the public in 1868. In the 1980s, spelunkers
found lower, larger parts of the cave system that are filled
with water. The exploration is still going on.
The new system will make that much easier, and more accurate,
Sindelar said. "Within the 200 meters of the flooded corridors
of the Chynov cave, with a drop of more than 46 meters and a
very complex system, the deflection does not exceed tens of
centimeters," he said.
When observing the cave as a whole in the computer model, the
divers also can understand it better.
"In the 3D imagery, we can really realize the connections among
the corridors and of the whole system... we can get much more
information from it," Chynov cave specialist Frantisek Krejca
said.
(Reporting by Jiri Skacel, writing by Robert Muller, editing by
Larry King)
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