- How about we start with a question from somebody
in the room?
- Sounds good.
- You okay with that?
- We're ready.
- Hey, Rippon Middle School is sending their
first representative up. Come on,
let's see what you have.
- So how are caves and cave systems formed?
- Way to start us off. How are caves and
cave systems formed?
- That's a great question, that's such a great
question to start us off with. And as Amtrak said earlier,
when we first started the program, he gave us a hint, right?
He said his water moves through the rock. So
for caves like this, caves like the one that we're
standing in right now, here at Luray Caverns,
and caves in areas of the US and around the world
that are made from limestone, water interacts
with the rock to dissolve away that rock and carry
it away and create these cavernous rooms that
we're standing in right here. But, there are
other types of caves as well.
- Yeah so we're here in a solutional cave, right?
So Luray Caverns is a type of cave that it's called
solutional cave. But we have volcanic caves
and then we have talus caves that are formed by
rocks piling on top of each other, or sea caves
that form on shore lands, and glacial caves,
those are important as well so. Different types of caves.
- Three different answers, you okay with that?
- Yeah.
- Sweet, thank you.
- Thank you.
- Anybody else from Rippon Middle School,
you wanna... Come on.
- My question is, is
do, do sudden events cause the caves to form
or are they developed over many years?
- Good question, you think an earthquake opened this up,
that what we're asking, something like that? Let's see.
- Also a really good question, Amtrak gave us a hint
to this as well, he said over 400 million years ago,
this cave started to form. So many caves take a
very long time to form. They start out as something
very small and then, over lots and lots of years,
form these huge spaces. But as Nima mentioned,
there are lots of different types of caves
and some take less time.
- Yeah, especially if they have, let's say,
wave action. If you're on the coast and you have
the sea waves, and then you also have mechanical actions.
So some caves form faster, but not fast enough for
us to actually notice. Yknow, it will take a long
time for us to see a big chamber like this,
millions of years. And that's why we have to preserve
and conserve them, they're very valuable to us
and they took many many years to form.
- Thank you.
- Thank you Amina and Martin for those questions,
really appreciate you all.