Into The Lost (Giant) Crystal Caves - Nat. Geog. channel Sunday Oct 10 2010, 8pm

[McTwist]

How was this cave originally discovered?

 

[DwayneHoover]

Ok, are those really crystals? And how the fuck... Who...What? HOW!

How was this cave originally discovered?

YES, they are real.

If you Google [giant crystal caves] a number of pages come up with more info, including a link for more images. OK fine, I'll do your work for you, but there's even more to be found if you look...

http://www.google.com/images?client...esult_group&ct=title&resnum=4&ved=0CDcQsAQwAw

This page at National Geographic with additional great photo:

Giant Crystal Cave Comes to Light
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/04/photogalleries/giant-crystals-cave/

April 9, 2007—Geologist Juan Manuel García-Ruiz calls it "the Sistine Chapel of crystals," but Superman could call it home.

A sort of south-of-the-border Fortress of Solitude, Mexico's Cueva de los Cristales (Cave of Crystals) contains some of the world's largest known natural crystals—translucent beams of gypsum as long as 36 feet (11 meters).

How did the crystals reach such superheroic proportions?

In the new issue of the journal Geology, García-Ruiz reports that for millennia the crystals thrived in the cave's extremely rare and stable natural environment. Temperatures hovered consistently around a steamy 136 degrees Fahrenheit (58 degrees Celsius), and the cave was filled with mineral-rich water that drove the crystals' growth.

Modern-day mining operations exposed the natural wonder by pumping water out of the 30-by-90-foot (10-by-30-meter) cave, which was found in 2000 near the town of Delicias (Chihuahua state map). Now García-Ruiz is advising the mining company to preserve the caves.

"There is no other place on the planet," García-Ruiz said, "where the mineral world reveals itself in such beauty."

AND: Giant Crystal Cave's Mystery Solved

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/04/070406-giant-crystals.html
Stefan Lovgren
for National Geographic News
April 6, 2007

It's "the Sistine Chapel of crystals," says Juan Manuel García- Ruiz.

The geologist announced this week that he and a team of researchers have unlocked the mystery of just how the minerals in Mexico's Cueva de los Cristales (Cave of Crystals) achieved their monumental forms.

Buried a thousand feet (300 meters) below Naica mountain in the Chihuahuan Desert, the cave was discovered by two miners excavating a new tunnel for the Industrias Peñoles company in 2000.

The cave contains some of the largest natural crystals ever found: translucent gypsum beams measuring up to 36 feet (11 meters) long and weighing up to 55 tons.

"It's a natural marvel," said García-Ruiz, of the University of Granada in Spain.

To learn how the crystals grew to such gigantic sizes, García-Ruiz studied tiny pockets of fluid trapped inside.

The crystals, he said, thrived because they were submerged in mineral-rich water with a very narrow, stable temperature range—around 136 degrees Fahrenheit (58 degrees Celsius).

At this temperature the mineral anhydrite, which was abundant in the water, dissolved into gypsum, a soft mineral that can take the form of the crystals in the Naica cave.

The new findings appear in the April issue of the journal Geology.