Cave Adventure: Exploring Caves in Your House
Exploring Caves in Your House
Also, check out our “Headlamp and Flashlight” activity!
If you don’t want to build a cave fort, an easy way to explore the cave is using your imagination and exploring your house. A cave has to be three things; a hole in a rock, made by nature, and it has to fit a human. Using these guidelines loosely, there are many places where a human could fit. I never said that a human had to be an adult or comfortable. If you can curl up in a ball, that works!
You will need: Flashlight, headlamp (optional)
- The Kitchen Table: To get into this cave, you’ll have to squeeze through the tight gaps between the chairs or maybe even under them. Then you emerge into this big room you’ve discovered,
- Under the Bed: This time you’ll have to get onto your belly to get down and dirty with all the wildlife that exists in this dark place.
- In the Tub: Sometimes caves can be a bit wet. Cave kisses drip from the shower-head. The entrance into this cave is behind a sheet of water.
As a background to your cave adventure, you should probably know about speleothems, which are cave formations. The main types are stalactites that hang tight to the ceiling and stalagmites that might reach the ceiling one day. The formation of any speleothem takes an extremely long time. As each drop of water leaves a tiny amount of mineral residue on a cave ceiling, floor, wall, or other features, it adds to speleothem growth. When a speleothem is broken, it will not be replaced within our lifetime, if ever! Therefore, cavers must be extremely careful while exploring.
