The Spatial Connection

Cave Mapping - Final
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[00:00:00] Kelly: Welcome back to the Spatial Connection, the podcast where we explore the fascinating journeys of geospatial professionals and dive into the incredible ways location-based technologies are shaping our world. I'm your host, Kelly McGee, and today's guest is Aaron Addison. Aaron's a returning guest, but today instead of learning about his journey, which we've already done, we're gonna learn a little bit about cave mapping.

[00:00:21] Kelly: Join me as we learn about how Aaron got involved with cave mapping and what's involved with it. This is gonna be an exciting one. I hope you enjoy it. Welcome back to the podcast. Today we are gonna talk about something a little bit different. We're not gonna be doing a, a career story today. I'm gonna have Aaron Addison back with us and Aaron's gonna talk a little bit about mapping caves.

[00:00:44] Kelly: Aaron's got a lot of experience in this side and, uh, you know, kind of knew this and we were very excited to get him back on the. The show and give us a little bit of insight about what it is to, to map a cave and how that has evolved over time [00:01:00] and how maybe GIS interplays with it as well. Well, Aaron, welcome back to the, uh, the podcast.

[00:01:05] Kelly: Glad to have you back.

[00:01:06] Aaron: Thanks, Kelly. Glad to be here.

[00:01:09] Kelly: Awesome. So why don't we do this? I know for some of those that may have not heard your, your story, your episode, uh, before, uh, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and also how did you get involved with mapping caves? And we'll kind of go from that point.

[00:01:24] Aaron: Yeah, thanks. Uh. That's a, that's a long and winding tale, almost as complicated as mapping caves itself. But, you know, we have, we have our, uh, our different ways of learning things here in the Midwest, of which I'm a, a lifelong resident in Southern Illinois and, and nowadays in the St. Louis area. But we have a library book to blame for all of this.

[00:01:44] Aaron: As it turns out, um, when I was, uh, in, in high school, down outside of Carbondale, Illinois. Went to the local university there, SIU was literally just walking down the roads and picked up a book about cave exploration and noticed there were some other [00:02:00] books about caving on either side of that book. You know, before I knew it, I was sitting on the floor reading 'em, and the next thing I remember is, you know, being kicked outta the library because it was closing time and I was certainly hooked as something that I wanted to learn more about.

[00:02:15] Aaron: Of course, at that time, I had no idea it would become a life long passion. Um, but here we are, well over 30 years later and I'm still doing it. So, um, safe to say that, that I got the bug and the caves and caving and cave exploration and mapping, that you've been a part of my life ever since.

[00:02:33] Kelly: That's awesome. So did that kind of help shape what you decided to go to the university for in?

[00:02:39] Aaron: In a roundabout way, I guess, you know, I'm a child of the seventies and eighties. And my earliest memories of maps or when, I think maybe we talked about this on the last podcast, but just looking at, Rand McNally atlases, exploring the, unknown, tracing the lines, discovery places, and locations and caves are really an [00:03:00] extension of that.

[00:03:01] Aaron: You know, how do you go into a place where you can't see what's going on and try to understand it, try to depict it visually. Try to do science and try to make sure you're doing everything responsibly and safe, uh, at the same time. And, you know, and of course, not getting lost, not getting root, uh, not breaking formations, not touching things you shouldn't be touching, uh, et cetera.

[00:03:26] Aaron: And so, yeah, I guess, you know, one of the things that I always have, have been mindful of in my, in my day job in m Geospatial is that. What can I learn from what's happening in these professional industry of geospatial that I can take? Then back to documenting caves, understanding caves around the world and when, and adding to the scientific record.

[00:03:50] Kelly: Yeah, I definitely could see the, uh, the mapping of a cave being different, than a typical mapping of a neighborhood or what we think of our cities and such. [00:04:00] You would think that it'd be easy because it's kind of a, a known area, but it's, it's not so well known as I believe. I understand things and I think you mentioned earlier that it's , you don't see what, you're, not what you're gonna map. It's a lot of,

[00:04:16] Aaron: yeah.

[00:04:16] Kelly: You know, it's gonna be dark down there. There's a lot of other environmental factors that make it much different than mapping, say, a city. Uh, so I, I can imagine that's gotta be a bit of a challenging task as well.

[00:04:28] Aaron: Uh, for sure.

[00:04:29] Aaron: I think, uh, caves by their nature are typically very hostile environments. They're certainly hostile to things like electronics, things that we take for granted on the surface. You know, when you take electronic survey instruments and start knocking them on rocks and dropping 'em down cracks and the floor and getting them wet and muddy, uh, they don't survive.

[00:04:50] Aaron: And so sometimes just because it's possible to do something like the technology. It might be preferable to do something in a very sort [00:05:00] of, uh, manual basic way using even a compass in the tape rather than trying to get some fancy electronic distance meter to work properly. You add on top of that colder temperatures, the fact that you do have a dynamic environment, you know, where you don't wanna be in the cave, if it's gonna rain.

[00:05:20] Aaron: For flooding and, and other reasons. So it, it's really this sort of complex problem that you're solving in real time in order to understand a truly three dimensional space. You know, and we survey above ground. We're serving for the most part in two dimensions. Yeah, we might do some topographic or something like that, but.

[00:05:42] Aaron: When you're surveying in tunnel systems, it's quite different in terms of all the things you're trying to depict from the map, you know, because if you look at something like bats, their habitat's actually on the ceiling, not on the floor. So when you draw the map, are you drawing the ceiling or are you drawing the floor?

[00:05:59] Aaron: 'cause if you wanna study [00:06:00] bats, then you need to really be thinking about drawing all the nuances and features on the ceiling and the high walls, and not so much on the floor. But if you're studying hydrology, you don't really care too much about the ceiling. And you wanna know what's happening on the floor.

[00:06:13] Aaron: So you have to understand what's fit for purpose, how people are using these maps, uh, you know, after they found, and whether you're doing it in geospatial during any cave mapping. You know, the map is just the beginning. It's not the end. It's only once we get that map. But it can be used for science, it can be used for management, it can be used for all those downstream activities.

[00:06:33] Aaron: But it all starts with sort of a base mouth. And understanding, you know, whatever it is that you're trying to, to document. Very interesting. So how old were you when you did your first cave mapping project? It's probably going back to 16 or 17 years old. Just a small cave in southern Illinois. You know, found out about it and talking to some people and, uh, we, we had no idea what we were doing.

[00:06:58] Aaron: I took a spiral bound [00:07:00] notebook, I took a protractor and a pencil and that was about it. I didn't really know how to approach it. I certainly had no training. Um, but we were excited and we had to try to figure this thing out. We quickly found out how difficult it was to do without any training, uh, and certainly to do it properly.

[00:07:20] Aaron: And so we wanted to make sure if we were gonna go to the effort of doing it, we wanted to understand it and we would do it properly. And that got us connected to the local camping club in Carbondale. With people who had much more experience use s of things than we there when we started that, that process of learning the techniques, um, what works, what doesn't work, and, and really standing on the shoulders of the people that came before us to, to try to understand these new, uh, natural resources.

[00:07:48] Kelly: So is there a fairly large cave? I, I don't, I guess one of the things we want to probably establish is, is how do you refer to somebody that's, that maps caves, are they caver? Or how do you, how do you properly [00:08:00] address someone?

[00:08:00] Aaron: So, uh, people may have heard the term Spelunker. Caver.

[00:08:04] Kelly: Mm-hmm.

[00:08:04] Aaron: Even if you, if you're really into, you may have heard the term speleologist, which is a, uh, a European origin term for people who've studied caves.

[00:08:14] Aaron: Caver call themselves Caver Caver, who see people who aren't caver going caving we call spelunkers. But so, you know, another way to think about that, uh, over the time is, uh. cavers rescues, spelunkers. Spelunkers. Don't rescue Caver. But it does bring up the safety aspect, which I wanna make sure we hit on here as well.

[00:08:35] Aaron: Um,

[00:08:35] Kelly: yes,

[00:08:35] Aaron: I know you guys, you guys had brought that up thing in our pre- conversation, and really there are resources at the national and local level through the National Speleological Society, which is the Nationwide Association of Cavers, probably 10 or 15,000 members in that organization.

[00:08:53] Aaron: From coast to coast and even international, that are dedicated to studying and, and understanding caves. And [00:09:00] even here locally, we have a number of caving clubs, so that are called Grotto in Meramac Valley. Probably be the, the largest of those in the St. Louis area, but I'll, I'll offer you some links that we can include in those show notes so people could get connected.

[00:09:14] Kelly: Perfect.

[00:09:14] Aaron: If they wanna visit caves, it's very important that you do that safely and responsibly. 'cause these are, these are essentially non-renewable resources. But moreover, uh, safety concern. You don't want to put yourself in a situation that you can't get out of. And there are some very, uh, you know, good resources to avoid that I know can.

[00:09:33] Kelly: Yeah, we want people to enjoy it and not be harmed by it. So yeah, definitely follow any safety, uh, resources that are made available. Get in touch with some of these, uh, local communities, these clubs. I think that's a huge plus with some of this. In in mind we talk about mapping caves. Can you give us an ideal is, you know, how many caves are we talking?

[00:09:54] Kelly: We'll just talk about the us. We won't talk worldwide from a, from a US perspective. [00:10:00] You know, you'd mentioned earlier in some of our discussions about how many caves were just in Tennessee alone in some of the areas. Can you give us some idea of what those quantities look like?

[00:10:08] Aaron: Sure. So there are, there are caves known from every state in the United States, including Alaska, Hawaii, the caves here in the Midwest, and, uh, you know, Illinois, Missouri and Indiana and Iowa.

[00:10:20] Aaron: And, and then on down in the Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, et cetera. Those are all limestone caves and these caves are born whenever water lands on the limestone rain and runoff and stuff, and then it, it dissolves the limestone, through a chemical process over tens of thousands of years that create the caves that we see in our area.

[00:10:41] Aaron: You can see if you drive down the bluff, you can see, uh, little potholes and, and rock and stuff like that. Those are the beginnings of caves in the many regards. Uh, or if you're walking down a creek, you see a spring coming out of a hole in the ground, that's the water running out of the cave. So I think that's, you [00:11:00] know, where the bulk of the caves are formed in the us.

[00:11:03] Aaron: But if you go to places like Hawaii, certainly there are lava tubes that are formed very differently than the limestone caves and the, within the, the limestones, we also have their dolomites, and we have marble caves out in California. Then we have different types of caves in the southwest called pipe caves, which are being formed from, the sulfuric acid coming up from below instead of the rain coming down through flood. So by a variety of ways that case form, but to the numbers, you know, we always talk, one of the questions that's a visitor center question we call it is how many miles of unexplored passages are there life. Well, if we knew that it wouldn't be un explored.

[00:11:42] Aaron: And so it's like, how many caves are there? Well, we knew that then we would be done, but you know, right now I think we've, we've documented probably in the tune of 40 and 50,000 caves from the United States, the most of which the or you people, really know the most out of the generally Tennessee right now, probably [00:12:00] has the most document caves of something around 500 or maybe even over 10,000. And a state like Missouri State, like Missouri would be in the 6 to 7,000 range. But interestingly, you just come across the river into Illinois and you're below a thousand. Um,

[00:12:17] Kelly: Really,

[00:12:17] Aaron: People say, well, how, how can it be so low?

[00:12:19] Aaron: It's like, well, because glaciers covered most of Illinois 10,000 years ago, and there may in fact be some caves down there, but they're under 500 feet of glacial tilling. Currently, you know, and so until all that erodes away again for the next period of glaciation in the, in the future, you might see some more caves.

[00:12:37] Aaron: But right now, and, and you can see this just looking at a to topographic map, most of the caves in in Illinois are found along the Mississippi River, where you tend to find more hills than areas may be that we're overlooked by the glaciation, uh, from the Wisconsin glaciers. Anywhere where you've got you the flat farm land is characteristically found em in central and Northern Central Illinois.

[00:12:59] Aaron: You're not gonna [00:13:00] find any caves. You just don't see any better off there. And again, if you do, it's gonna be in a place like Starved Rock, where you've got the Illinois River cutting down through there, and there's some very interesting geology there. It's just not geology we took with lead bio week to the cave systems.

[00:13:14] Kelly: So I guess this was a question too. How small of an opening can still be considered a cave?

[00:13:22] Aaron: These definitions are left up to the state surveys typically. And so one division definition might be very, you know, sort of, it has to be 50 feet long, it has to be 50 feet deep or something. There would be some measurement put on that, whereas another state might have language that says you have to be out of daylight, has to be completely dark.

[00:13:43] Aaron: And so things that we may conversationally call a cave might actually be more classified as something like a shelter block. So if that's a place like, oh, I know the Indians use that and there's evidence of, you know, all these kinds of things. Or if you go, especially if you [00:14:00] go into southern Illinois, around like Giant City in areas like that, south of there Ferne Clyffe as much they, the state park, those would be where like shelters, those wouldn't be true caves because you're not really going underground.

[00:14:12] Aaron: You know, you're still very much in the daylight. You know, there might be a little bit of a rock overhearing or something. Graham Cave here in Missouri's, another great example about, but they're not true caves. And say, well, I can, you know, I could climb down or I could repel down the rope into a hole that's 200 feet deep and still see daylight so is that a cave?.

[00:14:33] Aaron: And so you have some nuance in the definitions of all these things. But, uh, as long as you have a definition, then you have a point of discussion. And the databases that track these things oftentimes will continue to track all those additional, uh, features. They just won't be included in that final published number, uh, of the number of caves.

[00:14:56] Aaron: And the, the reason we do that, and this, this sort of crosses over into [00:15:00] geospatial, is that that way if somebody else reports the same feature, we know it's already in the database. We've already got a dot, we've already got a GPS location or some coordinates for that feature. Um, so we're not getting the same feature to report it over and over and over again into the database.

[00:15:15] Kelly: So I guess that takes us to the next part of this. You, you get a cave. I guess, do you typically find yourself mapping a new cave or is it more extending of what's already been mapped, what you know about a cave currently?

[00:15:29] Aaron: Yeah, it's a great question. So it's all the above. Sometimes we discover new caves, and that's one of the things that really gets me most excited and most passionate about caving, is that if you discover a brand new cave, you can legitimately say that you're the first human being that's ever seen that, not just out of the, the 7 billion that are on earth the day, but in, in all time.

[00:15:52] Aaron: And what's really crazy about that is that there are places within a hundred miles of St. Louis where you can still do that.

[00:15:59] Kelly: Really,

[00:15:59] Aaron: but [00:16:00] there are still places to be discovered that no human being in the history of human beings has ever laid eyes on or stepped on. And that's pretty unique. Um, not very many places on the surface where you could say the same thing.

[00:16:14] Aaron: And so that's really that thrill of discovery being the first documenting, you know, we have a sort of a philosophy that's called map As you Go. You don't wanna run ahead and explore everything. You want the entire team on that, on the survey to experience everything at the same time. So we try to document things as we go rather than just trying to run around all over the place and explore it all and then say, Hey, we'll come back later and make the map, which course never happened.

[00:16:41] Aaron: And so that's, that's one way. The other way though is sometimes maybe a, a cave was mapped 40 years ago using the state of the art of the day, the technology and techniques have improved. It may warrant remapping the cave, documenting it again. Uh, so there's [00:17:00] that, that scenario. And then your last one is that sometimes new discoveries are made, you know, a new sinkhole opens or a new passages discovered that wasn't previously known.

[00:17:10] Aaron: And that'd be an example of extending a, an existing map into new. Sort of new grounds.

[00:17:16] Kelly: So let's say it's, you're getting ready to go out and do a, a new project. Can you kind of walk us through what is that like if you're, and I, I'm calling these projects, there may be another way you refer to these, but if you're gonna do more mapping, what kind of tasks are involved with that?

[00:17:30] Kelly: And maybe also what kind of, uh, preparation and equipment do you, typically put together to go do a a mapping project for a cave.

[00:17:39] Aaron: Well, first and foremost, you wanna make sure you have permission to be on the land. Almost all of the caves in the Midwest are most certainly are owned by private land owners.

[00:17:48] Aaron: And if you don't have their permission and you're trespassing, and trespassing is trespassing, whether you're doing it for hunting and fishing and you're doing it for caving, and so you wanna make sure you have the permission and you have good [00:18:00] landowner relations, you know, in order to visit these locations.

[00:18:03] Aaron: But caving is again, not unlike hunting or fishing, where there's a certain set of gear that every participant is expected to have. You know, you need a rod and reel. To go fishing, you need boots and knee pads and a headlamp to go caving. And so there's some, some investment. And of course, just again, like, like hunting or fishing, you can either buy the entry level model or you can buy, you know, the, the very advanced or expensive versions of those same things.

[00:18:32] Aaron: But if you're just getting started, you don't need all the, the fanciest, the fancy gear. You just need something that's safe to use to follow some basic rules. So we have typically, each person is responsible for bringing three independent sources of light. You have the light on your helmet, you have two more lights in your, in your cave pack.

[00:18:54] Aaron: Um, so if one light fails, you still have a backup light to get out of the cave. And so it's, uh. [00:19:00] Partly about being responsible and, and also being prepared in the event that something goes wrong with the equipment that you have. Or maybe you just wind up spending more time in the cave than you had anticipated, and you certainly don't want your batteries to run out or, or anything.

[00:19:15] Aaron: And still be a long way from the entrance because that's gonna result in, in a cave rescue, not a rescue where anybody was hurt necessarily, or hopefully, but one where you went into the cave unprepared, then now you have to call a rescue team that they'll find you because nobody knows what happened. And so, you know, being prepared is an important part of them.

[00:19:36] Kelly: And I know I've been myself, I've been in some caves and some mine shafts. And the, the darkness you experience there is much different than the darkness you would experience out in the wilderness. So it's complete darkness.

[00:19:50] Aaron: Yeah. The caves are the absence of photons. Right. One thing you, one thing you did say there that I would caution people to get is that, you know, we have a saying that [00:20:00] mines cave in, caves don't mine in, and I would, I would really actively discourage people from going in.

[00:20:07] Aaron: Any abandoned mines. These environments are, you know, very young, very unstable, and very unsafe in those uh, aspects. You think about a cave compared to a mine, the cave's been around for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years. How many earthquakes have come and gone? Everything that that can happen has happened to that cave and it's still there.

[00:20:29] Aaron: Whereas in a, in a mine, an abandoned mine, you bump one little thing and the next thing you know the roof is caving in. And so there are very, very different experiences. Certainly would caution anybody contemplating going in mines to not do that. Um, and find something

[00:20:44] Kelly: Always takes a tour.

[00:20:45] Aaron: Yeah. There, there are things that were, you know, things that you can do where you don't get do-overs.

[00:20:51] Aaron: If you have a bad day, then bad days can happen very quickly in, in some of those situations. So, um. Make sure that [00:21:00] you're, you're very mindful and, and safety conscious area.

[00:21:04] Kelly: You've got your safety gear, you've got your three sources of light. What's the mapping type of gear that you, you take with you?

[00:21:13] Aaron: Sure.

[00:21:14] Aaron: So mapping kit's gonna involve a way to record notes and drawings. This is typically a small notebook. Um, we use waterproof, tear proof paper. Some, some of your listeners may have heard of products like write in the rain, you know, that are used in waterproof field books and things like that. So you need a field book of some sort.

[00:21:33] Aaron: Those can be bound, those can be loose leaf. They might be a smaller notebook size, or they might be full eight and a half, five by 11 sheets of paper that have been custom printed for for cave survey. And then you need a way to record a distance a azimuth or compass reading and inclination. The up and down. So basically, if you wanna think about it and geospatial terms, what you're trying to do is create [00:22:00] a three dimensional line plot of the cave.

[00:22:02] Aaron: And so we know caves, again, if we compare that to surveying on the surface, most of what we do is very, very close to being planer. Yeah. There might be some up and down and went up the hill. I went down the hill. But in a cave, because you're, the tunnel system was three dimensional. You might have the up and down, but oh, then it went down and came back under around the path again, connected on the other side, and now I have these complex three dimensional geometries, and so that's why we have to collect distance , azimuth, and inclination.

[00:22:33] Aaron: In doing that now, we can plot how far we went, which direction we went, and if we went up or down. Doing that over and over again. It's really like using a surveying term, traversing and in a traverse. Then we're creating a line plot, we have loops, we have side shots and everything, but all of these activities are to try to make the best representation with the a cave as possible by plotting all of [00:23:00] that out, and then using a sketch visual inspection sketch to draw in all the features that you see in the daily log.

[00:23:08] Aaron: Of course. caving and cave mapping is also evolving with technology, so we see the advent of distance or distos distance meters have a laser return to give me my distance, and there are cavers who are working on customized hardware to be able to also use magnetometers to do digital compass readings and then also do a digital compass.

[00:23:36] Aaron: And digital inclination, and these are getting better all the time. Um, so now you could, do, you know where you may have taken a sighting compass from Brunton or Suunto in the past? Now you would take one unit, they could take all three measurements and send those via Bluetooth back to the, to the sketcher, and the sketcher may be doing digital sketch, his virtualized software.

[00:23:59] Aaron: Or they might [00:24:00] be doing it straight into GIS or they might be, uh, you know, using information to, to add to the amount of detail that they have on the page in front of them.

[00:24:09] Kelly: So you're talking about the Bluetooth back to a sketcher. Do you typically have a, I guess what is a typical team size? Is it like two, three people?

[00:24:18] Kelly: What would you typically plan for?

[00:24:20] Aaron: Ideal, I would say is three, because then you have a person who's out out front. You have a person in the back that's responsible for instrumentation. And then you have the sketcher. The sketcher role is also usually the team leader because they're doc, they're the one that's documenting the cave.

[00:24:37] Aaron: So we're sort of calling the shout, so to speak. Having said that, you can certainly survey with two people and you can certainly survey with four people. It just depends on the nature of the environment or the cave that you're trying to document. The main thing you want to try to do is to have things for people to do, jobs to do, because what you don't wanna do is just have somebody who's sitting around all the time.

[00:24:59] Aaron: Because they're gonna get [00:25:00] bored. They're gonna get cold, they're gonna not being enjoying the trip. So, um, you know, keeping busy is, is the daily of the day.

[00:25:08] Kelly: And I can imagine it's tedious work. I can imagine it take quite a bit of time to do this correctly.

[00:25:14] Aaron: It does. So some survey trips can only, you know, 10 to 15 hours under

[00:25:20] Kelly: Wow.

[00:25:20] Aaron: Depending on where you're boating and what you're drawing. Usually it's controlled by what we call sketcher burnout. And so once the Sketcher's brain is fried from trying to concentrate for too long, or maybe it's just their neck hurts from looking down and drawing all day for 10 hours or something like that, or somebody's not feeling well, these are all reasons that trips, you know, trips turn around.

[00:25:44] Aaron: It's rarely. It does happen, but it's rare that you've actually like, reached the end of the cave, you know, and say, Hey, we're all done here. You know, that's, that's usually not the case, you know, because you're, you're documenting these systems that are thousands of feet, if not finals long, all the way up [00:26:00] to the world's longest Stone Cave is actually down in Kentucky at Mammoth Cave where cavers over the past 60, almost 70 years.

[00:26:08] Aaron: Have surveyed well over 425 miles, of known passage.

[00:26:12] Kelly: Oh wow.

[00:26:12] Aaron: Um, and all of that was done by survey crews underground.

[00:26:16] Kelly: And I can imagine this, you know, while it sounds simple that you're kinda walking into a cave, it's probably somewhat physically demanding.

[00:26:24] Aaron: It certainly can be. And you know, walking is a luxury.

[00:26:27] Aaron: Sometimes you're either crawling on your hands and knees, you know where rocks, mud, water, you're squeezing through tight places, or sometimes you're up. Flat out crawling on your belly through water and gravel and the streaming or the, you know, the passage may would be 18 inches tall. And so you're still trying to collect data, you're still trying to sketch, you're still trying to take measurements in those types of possible environments, which is not only rough on the equipment, but also on the participants, the people who are on the team.

[00:26:55] Aaron: And so that's where you get into some additional, you know, specialized clothing, [00:27:00] be it synthetics or things that are waterproof. And again, I'll use a. Hunting analogy, there is like you can go duck hunting with or without waders. Um, and it all depends on where you're gonna go. Duck hunting in the same kind of thing, either trout fishing or through without waders.

[00:27:15] Aaron: But where you go trout fishing is gonna determine, you know, you don't have to own waiters, but if you don't, you're gonna have to walk out in a cold river or, you know, or just find it different place. And so caving is very similar in that sense. He's got, you don't need all this equipment all the time, but there are times when it will, you know, all the things I'm talking about here, we're surveying actually in wetsuits because you wanna stay warm and then get dry in the cave.

[00:27:40] Kelly: Yeah, definitely can imagine. It gets quite chilly in some of those caves.

[00:27:44] Aaron: So caves are interesting because the temperature of a cave is whatever the above ground average temperature means.

[00:27:50] Aaron: So here in the St. Louis region, or average above brown temperature is 54 55 degrees for any given year. So all the caves in [00:28:00] our, in our region are 50, or 55 degrees for, and if you go up north where the average above ground temperature is colder, well, let's say go up into Montana, you know, their average above ground temperature for a year might be 38 degrees.

[00:28:15] Aaron: So all the caves are gonna be 38 degrees. The water in the cave is gonna be 38 degrees, et cetera. So that's where you really start getting into more technical. And if, if you've ever been into cenote or been down in Mexico. Gone into a cave you'll say, oh, it's a lot warmer. Well, that's because the average above ground temperature, it's much, much warmer in the tropics than here in the Midwest.

[00:28:37] Aaron: So you'll get, you know, cave temperatures that might even be 70 degrees or more in the water in those caves is 70 degrees something. Um,

[00:28:46] Kelly: wow.

[00:28:46] Aaron: So, you know, it, it definitely is tied to the above ground weather in that regard.

[00:28:52] Kelly: I'd like to ask a question, I guess here. You mentioned the sketcher. It's come up a couple times when there's.

[00:28:58] Kelly: When the Sketcher's sketching a cave, [00:29:00] what kind of equipment, or how do they, is it technically done on the waterproof notebooks or are they using any digital recording devices?

[00:29:10] Aaron: Yeah, so certainly the, the tried and true method is just pencil and paper. So you plot out the vectors using a, a protractor on your sketchbook, and then you're looking, you might have a disto or something with you.

[00:29:25] Aaron: But there we have a whole symbol library, and you have map legends and things that describe these, uh, symbols on the map to represent everything from bedrock and mud and gravel sand, um, but also things like flow stone, stalagmites stalactites and, and so forth. And so you, you have a whole symbol library, not unlike a surveyor learning their, their codes for their data collector that represent different things in the, in the local cable environment.

[00:29:54] Aaron: So it's a sketcher's roll to then to plot all that stuff out in a relative fashion to the baseline that was [00:30:00] collected through the instrumentation. Now, I mentioned this as sort of changing and evolving with technology and so on that on one extreme you have sort of the pencil and paper. On the other extreme of that you have terrestrial lidar scanning where people are taking actual lidar units in to caves and scanning the entire cave.

[00:30:20] Aaron: Now scanning and mapping are two different domains. They're not the same. And so again, what is it you're trying to produce as the final product? And can the map be a derivative of the LIDAR scan? And so this is sort of current thinking is like how do I extract a meaningful two dimensional map from the three dimensional lidar data that I collected?

[00:30:45] Aaron: Because you can see it, but it turns out to be a little more complicated than the, to extract those features in a way that they are helpful and makes sense in a two dimensional manner. And so, you know, that's where we get into conversations of data [00:31:00] collection where there's fit for purpose. Just because I can do the big, fancy, complicated lidar scan doesn't necessarily mean I want to do that because I might not have a use case for it.

[00:31:11] Aaron: So then how do I develop something and come back a couple steps from LIDAR and say, okay, here's what I really need. I need an automated instrument that'll do this, this, this, this for me. And some of that thing gets also to the point of product. What are you trying to produce? Anybody who's still doing cartography today knows that for better or worse paper still king, uh, which means that your final products need to be able to be printed and viewed on paper.

[00:31:36] Aaron: And that, of course, is a very different thing than digital native. So if, if the use case is that whatever you're drawing and whatever you're representing will forever be digital and it doesn't need to have any considerations for it being printed out on paper or to a PDF file or something then, you can have a different set of design criteria.

[00:31:56] Aaron: But for now, for the foreseeable future, um, [00:32:00] you know, I've been at this for 30 years. People keep telling me the paper's going away, but, hmm. I still have to buy more and more paper for the plotter because people with paper maps than digital needs.

[00:32:11] Kelly: Yeah. I always feel there's a little difference between mapping and modeling.

[00:32:15] Kelly: You know, the mapping is going to be more on your paper side. The modeling definitely 3D allows you to build that model to get more of a sense of the, the environment, uh, not just where things are at.

[00:32:26] Aaron: Yeah, I think those, those, I think you're a hundred percent correct and, um. And I think there's a convergence of those two domains over time, but I don't think we're anywhere close to it just because they have different use cases.

[00:32:41] Aaron: I think the most likely outcome, as I said, maps become a byproduct or a derivative with LIDAR data. So whatever scanning data you using, I'm sure there'll be some technology after LiDAR as well. But one of the things that you're constantly battling in the cave environment, of course, is that you can't see [00:33:00] everything at once.

[00:33:01] Aaron: You don't have the benefit of all things being lit up. And of course the way a lot of lidar looks currently and for the foreseeable future is that it's really taking a X, Y, Z reflectance return. It's a discreet point X, Y, Z, and then it's taking a photo, and then it's matching those two things up to create the.

[00:33:21] Aaron: The visual point cloud. Well, what happens whenever you don't have all the pictures or if you did have pictures, maybe they're not evenly lit, you have dark spots and things like that, and your scene. Um, it becomes a little more tricky to do, and so I think those are some of the areas where there's still research need to be done.

[00:33:37] Kelly: Yeah, I can imagine. There's, there's technology that's gonna come down the way that's gonna change the way we think. Oh, as it is with any industry.

[00:33:45] Aaron: So definitely,

[00:33:46] Kelly: Let's kind of take it out to the next step then. You, you collect all this data, then you're going through there and you get these sketches and stuff.

[00:33:54] Kelly: You get out of the, you get outta the cave. What do you. How do you, how do you take the next step?

[00:33:59] Aaron: This is the [00:34:00] life and times of a cartographer, right? Is that just because we're done collecting data in the field doesn't mean we're done drawing them out. And anybody who's ever been a survey tech or been a GIS professional knows, that's the, in many regards, the, the work's just starting whenever you get back to the office or back home.

[00:34:18] Aaron: And so you have to take all those field notes that we collected and now turning in, turning them into something meaningful, something that's usable. By people other than yourself. Right? So how do you take a data set and turn it into something that people who aren't as familiar with the data set that aren't experts at the data can still interpret the data?

[00:34:39] Aaron: Right? And this is the, the professional,

[00:34:42] Kelly: Like a whole new language for other people.

[00:34:44] Aaron: It is. And so it's the, it's the profession of cartography really. When you stop and think about it. How am I gonna take, you know, even going back to the 16th, 17th century, imagine yourself getting these ship logs and these rudimentary s room ship captains that have [00:35:00] sail across Atlantic, into the Pacific, into the, into Archipelago, like the West End or the Galapagos Island, and you get all these just crazy half drawn scraps.

[00:35:12] Aaron: Back from people who were there a year and a half ago, and now you're told to draw these into some sort of coherent map that can be used for navigation, like so people are going to set sail across the ocean based on your map and your understanding of what somebody else gave to you. that's many years old already and was collected probably under less than ideal conditions.

[00:35:34] Aaron: And so you, you find that in all areas of cartography , cartography. But certainly in caving when we draw cave maps, these are labors of love that have, well, hundreds if thousands of hours put into drafting and to redrafting and understanding these complex underground 3D environments. So a basic cave map would have three elements that would have a plan, [00:36:00] a profile, and cross sections along with cave passages.

[00:36:04] Aaron: And so this is, this three combinatory play. Of these three items are, well, what allow us to understand the, the true complex nature of the underground, you know, features that we're trying to map. And you might be able to do that on one sheet of paper. It might be in Atlas, it might be, uh, several sheets of paper stitched together.

[00:36:25] Aaron: We printed out the Mammoth cave map a couple times. Even at like an inch equals 50 feet. That map is 60 feet by 60 feet when it's printed out.

[00:36:35] Kelly: Wow.

[00:36:35] Aaron: And so you have to display it on the floor of a gymnasium. Uh, and people, you know, in walk around on with their socks, that they can see all the various cave passages because that's the scale that it takes to represent the world's longest known cave.

[00:36:49] Aaron: Other caves may be on a half sheet of paper because they'll be under 300 feet long and they're really not that complicating. So, you know, you can imagine the amount of time [00:37:00] it takes to look at something like that. You can see, you know, right in front of me here as I sit here in my top you, I have a 40 inch wide monitor primarily for cave cartography so that I can see a bigger section of the cave at one time, you know, and trying to draft it out.

[00:37:15] Aaron: Because I know whatever's happening on my monitor ultimately needs to be printed on in paper, and I need to understand what that's gonna look like on a paper. And again, I'll use the example of the GIS technician was the, you know, if you're working on the entire city plan and you're working at low level aerial, you know, we all have a story about when we printed, it out, it didn't look anything like that.

[00:37:35] Aaron: We thought it was going to look like. Uh, and we wound up and had to iterate through that. Still do that in cartography. We're trying to minimize the times that we have to print things. Review and so forth. So it's definitely something that takes a a tremendous amount of time. Well above and beyond the data collection in the field.

[00:37:56] Aaron: The data collection of the fields is the super exciting, sexy part [00:38:00] of it. That's the fun stuff. But the, the backside of that is all the office work with you sitting behind the computer reducing survey notes and certainly drafting them in,

[00:38:10] Kelly: And it's, it's very meaningful work. It might not be as sexy as you said, but it's very meaningful.

[00:38:14] Kelly: It's what carries on to, to go to the next stage, I guess.

[00:38:19] Aaron: Right. So it facilitates future exploration. It facilitates science, it facilitates any number of different things on how that map can be used. But you can't do any of those things until you have the map.

[00:38:30] Kelly: Right,

[00:38:30] Aaron: and so that's the, that's the part that's, I think, a little bit different than say, survey mapping or GIS, even these docs, everything that we work on, on the surface, there's a minimum, there's a Google Earth image of it, or there's a topographic map of it there.

[00:38:47] Aaron: There's something that we could go and look at. That's not the case for caves. Like you're going into complete unknown, you're going into a complete blank slate. How are you gonna represent it? What's, you know, what's gonna make your work meaningful [00:39:00] and resonate with you? Or the people that really need to rely on forward do their win.

[00:39:06] Kelly: I'm going kind of tie this into the next piece here. You've mentioned a couple times, GIS, we talked about sketching. Can you give us a a sense of is there other software you use to model these caves? And then how do you use GIS and is? They're, you know, what's the tie between them?

[00:39:25] Aaron: Sure. So, you know, the, the most basic sense, what you wanna know is how did the things that are underground that we can't see relate to the things above ground that we can see.

[00:39:35] Aaron: And so we would call this an overlay. And so how do I merge all of this, this three dimensional line fall, with all the different geospatial layers I'm going to have on the surface, so I can say, okay. Let's not build a road there because that'll be over the top of the cave. Or let's speed this to all, or we need to drill a wall for drinking water.

[00:39:56] Aaron: Avoid the carrier but wouldn't get contaminated. We, [00:40:00] so it's use everyday decisions and planning decisions, but it might also be, Hey, we noticed there's some dilution in the cave where that becoming from. Well, we noticed that there's agricultural, thing over here could be causing, or there's a chemical thing or here that might be not, um, you know, with spill or something.

[00:40:19] Aaron: And so that's the primary use case, I think between the two is to understand relationships, excuse me, above and below ground. It can get much more complicated then as well. Like I said, we may use those all available data for continuing exploration. Where is the cave likely to go? Or we may know where the cave ends underground, but it's not close to the spring yet.

[00:40:42] Aaron: We want to find a way to try to connect those two things, and so it really does depend on the use cases, but there's any number of ways that you can bring. Geospatial information in, again, most of the off the shelf software is not really capable of, uh, reducing and [00:41:00] managing cave data because of the three dimensional nature of it.

[00:41:03] Aaron: And, uh, and so we've had as a caver community, we've had a couple of very talented programmers over the years that have helped to write very, highly customized from scratch survey software, that can deal with the kind of data that we need to use. Some of those programs have been in use for more than 50 years.

[00:41:23] Aaron: Now. Some of them are being, uh, you know, reimagined as we speak. They incorporate 3D to incorporate some of the newer technologies, the capabilities. But again, these are labors of love that people aren't really being paid to do, but they see they have a particular talent for programming and they want to give back to the caver community.

[00:41:44] Aaron: And provide tools that allow not only others to, to further exploration, but they're usually into exploration themselves. And so they're developing these tools for their own use. Well,

[00:41:55] Kelly: Interesting. So I'm gonna take that to the we'll go next step where it's just like every piece has got a [00:42:00] little bit, it takes us a little bit further here.

[00:42:02] Aaron: Yeah.

[00:42:02] Kelly: And it's all very interesting things you don't think about, you know, when we talk about. At the beginning, it's like mapping a city is much different than a, a cave. And

[00:42:12] Aaron: Yeah.

[00:42:12] Kelly: You know, as someone that doesn't map caves, you know, we can only imagine what that would involve to, to do such a task, to, to really understand it.

[00:42:21] Kelly: It's, it's great to, to hear this process. We've mentioned technologies that are being used right now. Where do you see things go going in the future? What kind of, uh, advances do you think there might be, and are there some that are coming out that you're just waiting for?

[00:42:35] Aaron: Technology's evolving at a nice pace, uh, within the caving community.

[00:42:40] Aaron: Lot of the technology's not proven. I think the, the challenge and the trade-offs and caving and cave mapping have to do with the robustness of the, of the gear. You know, so imagine being like, when, I was on an expedition years ago. Loas over in Southeast Asia and you know, we [00:43:00] had all these grand plans to take a wound based tablet or Android tablet or something like that over there.

[00:43:06] Aaron: And we go way out into the jungle, you know, no wifi, not even electricity, really. Um, then we unpack the tablet, we turn it on, and the tablet wants to run an update on the operating system. Like it was worthless with the whole expedition, you know, so we carried this. How will halfway around the, world took it out in the jungle, we were gonna survey, you know, use it to reduce the survey.

[00:43:31] Aaron: So this has gonna be fantastic. You'll be able to plot it all out, see any mistakes and fix those before we go. Nobody anticipated that it was gonna try to run the system update, right? And so things that you just don't think about in those more hostile environments, or, you know, you buy an electronic instrument that's the size of a pack of cards that's gonna do all this fancy data collection for you.

[00:43:55] Aaron: Somebody drops it on the way to the cave or bounces off of a rock, the glass is shattered. Does it [00:44:00] work? You know? Or maybe somebody drops it in the water, it's fried, you know? And so now is it, is it really gonna kill the whole trip? Do you have some backup plan? The technology's really nice when it works, but when it doesn't, you know, you know, a lot of times we find ourselves doing, working for the technology, the technology's not working for us anymore.

[00:44:21] Aaron: And then again, that's true in, in survey and that you know, how many days, you know, people spent trying to calibrate or trying to get, you know, a data collector to work correctly or something like that. I know this thing's supposed to work. It's really cool when it does work, but it's not working right now. You think about caving is that the expense and all of this is mobilizing all the people in the gear to get to the cave.

[00:44:44] Aaron: So you wanna make sure you're doing whatever you can do in the field while you're in the field. Everything else that can be done in the office, do that in the office. But you wanna optimize for your time in the field. And part of that optimization is the redundancy and making sure you've got a [00:45:00] backup plan.

[00:45:00] Aaron: Plan A doesn't work. You know, sometimes that's easier, sometimes that's harder, that's harder. Uh, like being halfway around the world in general. But you always wanna make sure you've got a backup from, you know, to, to make sure you're getting the highest quality data. Out of the cave every single time you go in.

[00:45:16] Aaron: Not just because of the expense, but also understanding that caves are essentially non-renewable resources. That if you damage a part of that cave for all practical purposes in your lifetime and probably your future generations, that's, that's forever damaged. And that's why you're, we don't touch formations.

[00:45:35] Aaron: We don't. Certainly don't break them off. 'cause bills are permanent conditions though, for all practical purposes, yes, they may repair themselves in a thousand years, but so, you know, we, we sort of adopt a credo, take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints, kill nothing but time, you know, and, and leave the resources and far better shape than, than how you found it.

[00:45:57] Aaron: And that sometimes means paying a little bit of [00:46:00] extra attention to what you're doing and not just, you know, stay on the trail. Don't wander off, don't do things unnecessarily. Don't kick the rock just because you're bored and you want to kick a rock. Um, but really being a very mindful participant in these fragile environments, well, geologically and biologically, this is the conversation that always comes up.

[00:46:21] Aaron: Everyone brings that endangered species. Yeah, there's a little snail that's in the water. It's as big as my fingernail. Nobody really cares if it disappears from the earth. Okay. Fair enough. What they're not telling you that, that snail, if they can't live in the water, there's something wrong with the water.

[00:46:39] Aaron: And now you know, if you're getting their drinking water. And about 60% of the people in our area get their drinking water out of the ground. Is that now, it's gonna make you, it's gonna make your kids, it's gonna make your grandkids sick. You know, say you don't have to care about the snail. If what you care about is not people in your house not getting sick, then let's clean up the underground water [00:47:00] resources.

[00:47:00] Aaron: You know, we know if a snail can live in the water, then the water is safe to drink.

[00:47:05] Kelly: That's very interesting, uh, thought right there. I'm gonna ask you three more questions here, uh, so I can ask you questions all night, but I'm gonna try to limit it here. So

[00:47:16] Aaron: Sure.

[00:47:17] Kelly: Number one is gonna be do you have a favorite cave that you like?

[00:47:21] Kelly: Going back to the other one is gonna be, do you have any projects coming up that you're looking forward to? And I guess the third one is, is there a. A particular club or where can people find more information if they want to maybe look into this? And is the data that you guys collect, so if you have particularly, you know, we're a geospatial podcast here, I'm gonna go, is there any geospatial data for caves that people can access?

[00:47:50] Aaron: Favorite cave. I think, uh, you know, certainly there have been a, a number of unique experiences. You might imagine it be the last three decades. I don't [00:48:00] know that I could point to one single event or experience. That's my favorite. There are some caves here in the Midwest that are very near and dear to my heart, but there are some caves that I've been fortunate enough to visit National Park Service System and Global that are also spectacular.

[00:48:15] Aaron: And I think it's the experiences not only in the in the locations you're at, but with the team that you're with and the people you're with that make those experiences, especially make them what they are. Over time. And so I, I really, you know, that might be feeling a little philosophical, but that's sort of how I started to think about that some 30 plus years on into caving, uh, project work.

[00:48:41] Aaron: I have a major project to document all the caves in the Galapagos Islands, and we've been going down there for about 15 years. You know, surveying caves discovering caves, they're not. In the grand scheme of things, they're not super big or super long caves. They might be on the order of a couple miles long there.

[00:48:59] Aaron: They might be [00:49:00] in the order of 200, 300 feet deep, but they're not gonna compare with the world's deepest. They're not gonna compare with the world's long or anything like that. But the Galapagos is a really special place.

[00:49:10] Kelly: A lot of diversity there,

[00:49:12] Aaron: a lot of diversity, and a lot of things that are unknown to science.

[00:49:15] Aaron: And really just a fantastic place to do field work and to hopefully add to the scientific record at the same time. So I think that's, that's probably the, where the bulk of efforts. are right now in caving, although I'm involved in some local projects here and near as well. Then the third question around getting you more involved, I'd say connect with some of those resources in the show notes.

[00:49:39] Aaron: I mentioned one caving club here locally in the St. Louis regional Club, Merrimack Valley Grotto, or NVG. Um, that's a great group of folks. Even within people, they get together once a month and they get talks to the recent cave projects scheduled trips outings for both new and experienced cavers.

[00:49:59] Aaron: [00:50:00] Just a really great place to make friends and, and long term connections that are equally passionate about caves and cave exploration. So again, just check out some of those show notes and uh, get connected.

[00:50:14] Kelly: And then I know I kind of snuck a another one in there. It was worth, is there data sets that people can access?

[00:50:21] Aaron: Oh, sure. So caves. Cave data is usually accessed through these communities, and the reason for that is that again, it's data that can be misused by easily and it's we're trying to protect non-renewable resources. So if somebody goes in and damages a cave, puts graffiti in the cave, you know, I'm always amazed at the number of beer cans that people can carry into a cave full.

[00:50:46] Aaron: We can't carry 'em out empty, but you know, we do have, uh, unfortunately, a number of stories where caves have been vandalized, but led, uh, to either permanent damage or changes therein. Managed, [00:51:00] you know, caves have been closed by people and things like that. They're just seemingly gone out of their way to do bad things to these environments, unfortunately.

[00:51:11] Aaron: And, and sometimes we need to protect caves for endangered species like bats. And, um, and there are reasons too. Uh, so I think the best way to get access to the data is to get involved in these communities to, to contribute. And you'll find people are more willing to share data with you.

[00:51:28] Kelly: Well, very interesting. I know, .

[00:51:30] Kelly: I've enjoyed this talk immensely and I could probably think about. Two other dozen questions I'd like to ask you, but for time sake, we'll we'll save that maybe for part two and three and we'll see about that. I really appreciate you taking the time to, to talk with us about this. I think it's interesting that we get a chance to, to share not just, you know, maybe how people got involved with geospatial and.

[00:51:54] Kelly: You know, the technology's being used, but understanding how people are using and applying [00:52:00] technology, especially from the geospatial realm. And this is one people don't think a lot about, you know, typically we're thinking about what's on the earth and we've even heard that most of the oceans haven't been, you know, there's a lot that's not been, yeah, even explored a map there, but we don't hear a lot about the cave side.

[00:52:16] Kelly: So I thought that was a very interesting topic to, to be able to share with listeners. So. I really appreciate your time taking with us and, and your experience, you know, sharing that experience that you've got. You know, like you said, we'll share some of that information in the, in the show notes so people can learn a little bit more about, about caving and also, you know, learn about some of the safety precautions they need to, uh, take care of and also who to, who to talk to.

[00:52:42] Kelly: Well, with that, I'm gonna wrap us up, I think here, unless you've got anything else you'd like to add, Aaron?

[00:52:46] Aaron: No, I think that's a, it's been a pleasure talking about it and. I agree. I could talk about this for a long time, but it is a great place, you know, for me to continue my practitioner experience with geospatial [00:53:00] technologies, which allows me to see how they work in real world situations, you know, and whether or not, well, I mean, you know, it's a little bit of credibility.

[00:53:10] Aaron: I wrote the outline behind what I'd say whenever I say, you know, not only do I talk about these products and they have actual real world experience using it. It helps also keep me sharp on, you know, the latest and greatest technologies are and how they can be applied in real world cases because if I can do it in these instances, I know I can do 'em above ground mapping a city or digital twin or something.

[00:53:35] Aaron: That's, you know, a very different use case that moves from all the same methods and and approaches. So thank you for

[00:53:42] Kelly: Very true,

[00:53:43] Aaron: for inviting me. And hopefully this is has been an interesting discussion for your listeners

[00:53:49] Kelly: Oh, I'm sure. It sure it will be because it has been interesting for me. So, well, with that, we'll, uh, we'll end this episode and maybe next time, uh, we'll talk about again and maybe I'll [00:54:00] have a chance to go out and map some caves with you or something.

[00:54:02] Kelly: That'd be kind of cool.

[00:54:03] Aaron: Absolutely, anytime.

[00:54:05] Kelly: Alright, well take care, Aaron, and we'll talk to you again soon.

[00:54:08] Aaron: Thanks Kelly.

[00:54:09] Kelly: Thanks.

[00:54:09] Kelly: Thanks for joining us on the Spatial Connection. If you enjoyed today's episode. Please don't forget to subscribe, rate and review the podcast on your favorite platform. You can also follow us on social media and our website.

[00:54:21] Kelly: Do you know someone with a fascinating geospatial story? If so, send us a message. We'd love to hear about them. Until next time, stay curious, stay connected, and keep exploring the world through the lens of geospatial technology.