Stunning cave full of crystals up to 11m long, but is it at risk?

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/04/
photogalleries/giant-crystals-cave/index.html 

It's a rare time I'd ever bother watching 60 Minutes, let alone rave over an item on it.

But the crystal cave featured this week is simply stunning. Picture crystals up to 11 metres long and a metre or more square across. Picture a cave completely chokko with them, like a gigantic version of those crustal gardens you buy for your children.

That's what was on show. It is in a massive cave that was broken into at the back of a Mexican mine in the Chihuahua area in 2000. And the crystals are all gypsum, bred in a soup of thermally heated water with temperatures above 50 degrees.


But the miners pumped the water out - the mine is working so they had to. This means the mine has stopped growing, and may actually already be in decline.

It was funny to see the 60 Minutes team battle to tolerate just 10 minutes in there, with internal body temperatures climbing to 39 degrees and beyond, to emerge literally drenched. Cool suits allowed them to return for longer.

But they reported that the mine owners have realised what a 'gold mine' they are sitting on and are considering opening the mine up the tourists. How it can be managed without further manipulating the internal environment is hard to imagine. Just the sweat alone could cause irreparable damage to the crystals. Anyone who has explored the limestone caves around Australia would have seen the damage done by early explorers a hundred plus years ago. It seems amazing that the same ill-thought out treatment could be about to happen again in current days and to a far more important formation.

It gets worse. A treasure trove of never before seen lifeforms was discovered in the waters, living simply off the heat and the minerals. A source of research into how lifeforms could also develop and thrive in other such environs - like the thermal plumes on Saturn's moon Enceladus or the gravitationally massaged ice capped oceans on Jupiter's moon Europa.

Here's a good account of a visit to the cave.

This is undoubtedly one of the wonders of the natural world. It needs very careful management.