No one really knows and that's ok.

I am probably procrastinating.

[rudjedet]

Controversial Truths About Ancient Egypt Masterpost

The pyramids were built by contemporary workers who received wages and were fed and taken care of during construction

The Dendera “lightbulb” is a representation of the creation myth and has nothing to do with electricity

We didn’t find “““copper wiring””” in the great pyramid either

Hatshepsut wasn’t transgender

The gods didn’t actually have animal heads

Hieroglyphs aren’t mysteriously magical; they’re just a language (seriously we have shopping lists and work rosters and even ancient erotica)

The ancient Egyptian ethnicity wasn’t homogeneous

Noses (and ears, and arms) broke off statues and reliefs for a variety of reasons, none of which are “there is a widespread archaeological conspiracy to hide the Egyptian ethnicity”

[thatlittleegyptologist]

The carvings at Abydos aren’t modern machines but recarvings over old carvings. Sure they look like them but if you can read hieroglyphs and know that Ramesses II will even usurp the carvings of his own father just to be a little shit

[rudjedet]

‘No soot on the ceilings and walls of the Dendera temple!’ is actually because of extensive restoration works and not because Egyptians were in on shit like Baghdad “batteries”

While the Egyptians were fine-ass astronomers they didn’t align any of their enormous and/or important buildings to modern star constellations, because constellations look very different now than they did ~5000 years ago 

The pyramid is the simplest, sturdiest shape with which to build and many different cultures discovered this in their own time. There were never any weird fish humans/aliens involved

[rudjedet]

The sphinx of Gizah is only an approximate 5000 years old; the 10,000 year/rain erosion nonsense is proven hokum

Speaking of that particular sphinx, the Napoleonic expedition is not responsible for its missing nose

Akhenaten was not a “heretic” by contemporary standards

Ramses II appropriated a lot of his predecessors’ buildings/reliefs and isn’t really deserving of the epithet “the Great”

The Battle of Kadesh ended in a stalemate (twice)

[rudjedet]

While they had feline deities throughout their history, Egyptians didn’t actually worship cats themselves. This was a later Greek/Ptolemaeic addition

It was not, in fact, practice to shave off eyebrows after cats died; Herodotus lied about that

Herodotus lied about a lot of things and many misconceptions about ancient Egypt can be traced back to his Greek ass

[rudjedet]

I can’t believe I forgot my favourite Hill to Die On

Seth was not the god of “evil”, and despite his chaos providing a foil to order, he wasn’t completely villified until very late in Egyptian history, when he became associated with despised foreign enemies

[rudjedet]

Hats off to the few of you who’re reblogging this with tags saying you’re going to check my claims later. You make me not entirely despair of this hellhole.

Here are some vetted Egyptological books/sources (that are by and large appropriate for a lay-audience) you can find most, if not all of the above:

Lehner, M., The Complete Pyramids

Wilkinson, R. H., The Complete Temples of Ancient Egypt

Hornung, E., The One and the Many: Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt

Dunand, F. & Zivie-Coche, C., Gods and Men in Egypt

Kemp, B., Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization

Bard, K., An Introduction to the Archaeology of Ancient Egypt

Stevenson Smith, W., The Art and Architecture of Ancient Egypt

Kitchen, K. A., The Life and Times of Ramesses II, King of Egypt

Sweeney, D., Sex and Gender (in Ancient Egypt)

McDowell, A. G., Village Life in Ancient Egypt:  Laundry Lists and Love Songs

Te Velde, H., Seth, God of Confusion 

[rudjedet]

Guys do me a solid and reblog this version instead of continuously asking for sources on the other versions thanks

[robin-hood-for-freedom]

@thatlittleegyptologist

[thatlittleegyptologist]

I can confirm it’s correct because @rudjedet is also an Egyptologist so knows what she’s talking about. I’ve confirmed this before and I will again.

[mr-sardelli]

Monstrous Regiment: Lieutenant Blouse - Old Pencil Thumbnails

Now Towering was laughing. He was far too relaxed for a bound man, and Blouse sounded far too much like a nice but worried man trying to appear firm and determined. To Polly, it was like watching a child bluffing in poker against a man called Doc.

‘A word in private, Perks?’ snapped Blouse. He drew her closer, but Polly kept her eye on Sergeant Towering. He might be bound hand and foot, but she wouldn’t have trusted a man who grinned like that if he’d been nailed to the ceiling.

‘Perks, you are making a great contribution but I really will not have my orders continually questioned,’ said Blouse.

‘You are my batman, after all. I think I run a “happy ship” here, but I will be obeyed. Please?’

It was like being savaged by a goldfish, but she had to admit he had a point.

[finleycannotdraw]

HOLLAND MARCH EVERYONE

[zagreuses-art]

The fine Rank and File (or at least the rank) of the Ankh Morpork city watch! I've been figuring out my designs for them, and I wanted to put them in a lineup to see how they look beside one another. makes you realize how ridiculous the height difference between some of them is

[ID: three digital drawings of the Watch members, against a police lineup background with height marks and an ankh morpork city watch watermark and logo. The featured members are in order of height: Detritus, Dorfl, Carrot, Angua. then Reg Shoe, Visit, Colon, and Vimes. finally, Nobby, Cheery, Buggy Swires and Wee Mad Arthur. they are all wearing variations on the watch uniform of brass colored armor, chainmaille, leather boots or sandals, and a skirt of studded leather straps. end ID]

more detailed description of the designs under the cut

First drawing: standing at over 8 feet is Dorfl. He is a grey-green troll with a very muscled top heavy build, patches of moss on his skin, and angular features. He is wearing oversized armor with pauldrons, one with sergeant's stripes painted on it, and scale mail underneath. the Piece Maker (a siege weapon crossbow) is strapped to his back. second, standing at 7 foot 4 inches is Dorfl, a reddish Golem made out of patchwork clay, with a overall gingerbread man look, and glowing red eyes. he is only wearing a breastplate, and he has his sergeant's stripes painted on his arm. Third at 6 foot 6 inches is Carrot. He is a redheaded white human, with a sturdy build, round face, and a cheerful smile. he has a captains pip pin in the collar of his shirt and his armor is visibly shinier than all the other's. fourth at 6 foot 2 inches is Angua. she is a white human with lots of very light blonde hair and slightly pointed ears. Her armor has straps at the shoulder rather than being one piece, and she is wearing her badge on a collar. (end of first drawing)

Second drawing: first, standing at 6 ish feet is Reg Shoe. He is a green zombie with a hunched posture and several missing chunks and lines of stitching visible, most noticeably the right half of his mouth has no lips, exposing his teeth. he wearing a tattered and patched flow-y white shirt under his armor, which is also the strap style, and there is a red ribbon in his long-ish dirty blonde hair. second at 5 foot 9 inches is constable Visit. He is a brown skinned human, with slicked back 80's business guy hair and a slightly strained smile. He is wearing a very crisp white shirt under his armor as well as khaki pants and a Omnian turtle necklace. he is clutching a bundle of pamphlets. Third at 5 foot 6 inches is Colon. He is a white human with a heavy-set build, a mustache, and a large bald spot. his armor has sculpted muscles in it and he is wearing sandals. Fourth at barely 5 foot 4 inches is Vimes. He is a white human with messy greying brown hair, and a five o-clock shadow, he looks a bit like house era Hugh Laurie. along with his armor he is wearing a red cloak and a sword. (end of second drawing)

Third Drawing: First, standing at 4 foot nothing, is Nobby Nobbs. he is a white-ish human with vitiligo spots, several suspiciously red or green patches of skin, and very scruffy black hair and a five o-clock shadow. he is smoking a cigarette and has several dog ends behind his ear. he has managed to tarnish his armor. second, at 3 foot 4 inches is Cheery. She is a white dwarf with a stocky build, blonde hair and a blond, braided beard. she has some burns on her arms, ears, and forehead, and is missing her eyebrows. she has a full lentgh leather skirt rather than pants. third, at 7 inches is Buggy Swires. he is a brown skinned Gnome, with grey hair and pointed ears. he is not wearing armor, but instead a rain cloak. next to him is his pigeon, which carries his badge and is a foot tall. Finally, at 4 inches, is Wee Mad Arthur. he is a blue nac mac feegle with red hair. he is in a watch uniform with a kilt, and is carrying his badge like a shield on his back, unlike the others he has a dynamic aggressive stance, rather than standing straight up. (end of third picture)

background of all drawings: a lineup height marker background, with the initials AM (ankh) CW and the city seal in the top right corner. the city seal is two hippos on a shield, with a tower between them. they are in shades of copper or bronze, as is the overall color palate of the drawings. (end of ID)

[saxifraga-x-urbium]

How Kazakhstan resurrected the North Aral Sea

The North Aral is the only remaining heir to the once mighty and plentiful Aral Sea, deserving of every effort to save it - even without lon

Over the last 20 years, Kazakhstan managed to resurrect the Small Aral Sea, a.k.a. the North Aral, a small part of the Aral Sea, which once was the fourth largest lake in the world, bustling with life and abundance. Situated between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, the Aral Sea fell victim to the Soviet Union’s agricultural policies. In the 1960s, when both nations were part of the Soviet Bloc, officials began cultivating vast stretches of barren land in Central Asia by diverting water from the two main rivers that fed the Aral Sea: the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya. Without water from them, more than 90 percent of the lake’s surface area dried up, turning the sea into the Aralkum Desert, filled with toxic pesticides and fertilisers washed down from the cotton fields. After years of restoration efforts, the North Aral, located on the Kazakh side of the dried-up sea, has become an astounding success story in reversing one of the worst anthropogenic environmental disasters in world history. Health and environmetal consequences The consequences of draining such a colossal body of water were devastating and continue to affect the population of regions around the sea and beyond. It significantly affected the climate, manifesting in unbearably hot summers and harsh frosts in winter. The residents of the Aral Sea region were hit hardest. In the late 1990s, the child mortality rate in the region was the highest in the world, and the situation remains dire. Every year, storms disperse 80 million tons of toxic sand and salt from the lake bed, which poisons the population, leading to a myriad of chronic and deadly diseases. NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites have been documenting the diminishing of the Aral Sea since 2000. Image from NASA Goddard Photo and Video. License: CC BY 2.0 Various regional studies found toxic substances, insecticides, and dangerous pesticides in the blood and urine of adults and children, and even in the milk of nursing mothers. Adults and children in the region often suffer from anaemia, cancer, kidney disease, and epidemic-spreading tuberculosis. Economically, the drying up of the sea killed off the finishing industry, one of the main sources of livelihood and food for locals. Until the 1960s, the annual fish catch amounted to 80 thousand tons, making the Aral Sea by far the largest fishery basin in Central Asia.

In addition to fish, which all disappeared from the sea due to increased salinity, the Aral Sea disaster also led to the extinction or endangerment of dozens of mammals, birds, and plants in the area.

Save a small part or lose all of it?

By the early 1990s, after the Soviet Union fell and Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan became independent, the Aral Sea stopped existing as a single body of water. It was divided into the “Big” Aral on the southern Uzbek side, fed by Amu Darya, and the “Small” Aral on the northern Kazakh side, fed by Syr Darya.

Connecting these two bodies of water was a narrow channel, which ran from the Kazakh city of Aralsk to the largest biological weapon testing site in the world, built by the Soviet Union on the so-called Vozrozhdenie Island, located in the Big Aral.

Uzbekistan failed to direct water from the Amu Darya, which originally fed 70 percent of the water to the sea. Consequently, the Big Aral became an evaporating pot for the water coming from the Syr Darya as well, which trickled down from the north, pushing Kazakhstan to prioritize saving the North Aral.

Put simply, there was not enough water to save the entire sea.

Thus, in 2005, Kazakhstan built the Kokaral Dam to trap water flowing from the Syr Darya and save the North Aral. Stretching 13 kilometers, the dam was built with the financial support of the World Bank.

By the time the dam was built, there were no fish left in the North Aral, and the shoreline had retracted 40 kilometers away from Aralsk, a former port town. In addition to building the dam, the authorities also modernized the irrigation and water distribution system to increase the flow capacity of the Syr Darya and save water for the North Aral.

Parts of the Aral Sea, a once-expansive body of water between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, have dried up, leaving boats grounded and the region desertified. Image from Flickr. License: CC BY 2.0

The results have been an astounding success. In 2025, the total volume of water in the North Aral increased by 42 percent and reached 27 billion cubic meters. This helped to decrease the salinity level by four times and reclaim 870 square kilometers of previously dried up sea bed.

Here is a YouTube video about the resurrection of the North Aral.

[you'll need to visit the article for this because i can't view or copy embedded yt videos]

Environmentalists also reintroduced fish to the sea — so successfully that the annual catch reached 8,000 tons, reviving the fishing industry and boosting local economic development.

Continued resurrection efforts

More good news awaits the North Aral in the near future. The Kazakh government has already announced that it will start implementing the second stage of the project to resurrect the North Aral and will continue cooperating with the World Bank and researchers.

Between 2026 and 2029, the authorities plan to make the Kokaral Dam wider and taller to help raise the water level from 40.4 to 44 mBS (meters of the Baltic system). This will also increase the water volume from 27 to 34 billion cubic meters and expand the water surface to 3,913 square kilometers.

In addition to reconstructing the dam, Kazakhstan will modernize and automate irrigation systems in the Turkestan and Kyzylorda provinces, through which water from the Syr Darya flows. This will further improve water resource efficiency and direct the saved water to the North Aral.

Here is a YouTube video about the next steps to resurrect the North Aral.

(this one apparently works?)

Ultimately, the goal is to improve the socio-economic standing of the population and the environmental situation of the nearby region.

Kazakhstan’s biggest challenge going forward is the sustainability of the North Aral. The interim success is built on man-made support, which makes the current landscape quasi-natural, characterized as “imperfect, unnatural, and weak” from the sustainability viewpoint.

Reports of significantly reduced fish catch amounts in 2025, from 7.8 to 3.9 thousand tons, and the receding water line underscore the precariousness of this victory.

Kazakhstan’s status as a “downstream country” also contributes to the sustainability problem, making it dependent on the upstream and neighboring Kyrgyzstan for a steady water supply. Not to mention the rapid melting of glaciers that feed the Syr Darya.

Despite these challenges, Kazakhstan has not given up on the North Aral. It has achieved what seemed near impossible twenty years ago and resurrected the dying sea. The North Aral is the only remaining heir to the once mighty and plentiful Aral Sea, deserving of every effort to save it — even without long-term assurances.

[johe-the-centipede]

MAGRAT GARLICK!^^

[foxehrobot]

You Have More Power Than You Think You Do: A Case Study In Getting Shit Done

I don't live in a walkable city.

I live in a mid-sized Texas town that only realizes that there are people who don't drive when TXDoT gives them money for active transportation infrastructure.

People constantly tell me that you just cannot walk or ride a bike in this city. It's impossible!

I do it anyway, because I firmly believe that solarpunk is a useless aesthetic if you aren't living it as best you can. We don't need technology to solve our problems we need will.

Also I do volunteer work on the political side of the local animal shelter and so I find myself at city hall several times a year and there's no bike rack.

Or rather there wasn't a bike rack.

I complained to someone, politely, informing them that I am doing this volunteer work and I don't have any safe place to lock my bike and that locking it to a handrail is inconvenient for everyone and also hideous.

A few months later a single staple-style bike rack was installed at city hall. It's not much, but I got sent a photo of someone else who got to use it before I did, clearly there was a need, if small.

Then I turned my gaze to the local grocery store, which had a bike rack, but the bike rack was terrible. It was too short for modern tire sizes, it was placed too close to the wall so one side was useless, and it was generally pretty cramped.

It took some time, but an advocate friend told me to contact the property owner instead of banging my head against the wall contacting HEB itself, and so I sent another polite complaint with a photo, explaining why it wasn't a very good bike rack and it would be really cool if we had a different one with better placement.

And about two months later, we have new staple-style racks at the grocery store, properly placed for maximum parking.

It's not a new bike lane. It's not a removal of parking minimums. It's not infill development or an active transportation advisory board.

They're just bike racks.

But that's the beauty of it. I, a person with an email address, some basic "how to be firm but polite while making an argument" skills, and a willingness to work out who to contact, fixed two problems for the local community. Trust me, I have had people wait on me to unlock my bike so they could have the "good spot." I was not the only person annoyed at the old rack.

It can be done. You're not powerless. Solarpunk doesn't have to be a wishful aesthetic.

Technology will not save us.

We have to save us.

[missmirrorselfie01]

[cundtcake]

translation: “My sheep! [bah! bah!] You are my life. [bah! bah!] Walk behind me…[bah! bah!] Sing (after me).”

[boomerang-always-comes-back]

This is too adorable

[great-gatsby]

every reread kills me a little bit more

[great-gatsby]

reread and enjoy <3

[fruitsilly]

[First image description: An edit of the "Oh Ariana, we're really in it now" meme, with Jason from The Good Place leaning against an Ariana Grande poster. The poster has been changed to a screenshot of Maggie Smith's poem "Good Bones" and Jason now says "Oh Good Bones by Maggie Smith, we're really in it now". End first ID.]

[Second ID: The full screenshot of the aforementioned poem. Transcript is as follows:

Good Bones / Maggie Smith

Life is short, though I keep this from my children. Life is short, and I've shortened mine in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways, a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways I'll keep from my children. The world is at least fifty percent terrible, and that's a conservative estimate, though I keep this from my children. For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird. For every loved child, a child broken, bagged, sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world is at least half terrible, and for every kind stranger, there is one who would break you, though I keep this from my children. I am trying to sell them the world. Any decent realtor, walking you through a real shithole, chirps on about good bones: This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful.

End ID.]

[jarl-deathwolf]

“‘Yeah? You want to shoot something? Bastards!’ They all stared, Carcer too. Reg had stood up, was waving the flag back and forth, was clambering over the barricade… He held the flag like a banner of defiance. ‘You can take our lives but you’ll never take our freedom!’ he screamed. Carcer’s men looked at one another, puzzled by what sounded like the most badly thought-out war cry in the history of the universe. Vimes could see their lips moving as they tried to work it out. Carcer raised his crossbow, gestured to his men, and said: ‘Wrong!’ Reg was hit by five heavy bolts, so that he did a little dance before falling to his knees. It happened within seconds. Vimes opened his mouth to give the order to charge, and shut it when he saw Reg raise his head. In silence, using the flagpole as an aid, Reg got back to his feet. Three more arrows hit him. He looked down at his skinny chest bristling with feathers and took a step forward. And another. One of the crossbowmen drew his sword and ran at the stricken man, and was knocked into the air by a blow from Reg that must have felt like it had come from a sledgehammer.”

— Terry Pratchett, “Night Watch” (I’m posting this whole thing not ONLY because it’s a great scene in itself, but also to draw a contrast with another scene.  Remember in Reaper Man when Windle Poons woke from death and had to lie on his slab for a while wondering what happened and how to move his body and get his organs working right?  Reg Shoe didn’t have to do that.  Granted, at the end of the fighting Reg considers what’s happened to him and falls over because his brain thinks he should be dead, but Vimes indicates it won’t be too long before he’s up again.  But here in the moment, Reg didn’t stop to think about it, and he gathered perfect control of his body to help beat the crap out of the bad guys.  Reg Shoe, who started his literary life as a comedic side-character, a parody of overzealous community organizers–a good-natured, kind parody since Reg’s activism never hurts anyone and is never described in a negative light–gets a stunning backstory, in which it’s firmly established that the reason he’s undead and not dead-dead is that he’s too full of fire and passion about the rights of his fellow citizens to leave the land of the living behind.  ‘You can take our lives but you’ll never take our freedom’?  A strange battle cry, but one that turned out to be true for Reg, at least. (via noirandchocolate)

[krakenartificer]

The other thing I absolutely love about Reg is that he actually, canonically, is too angry about injustice to die.

And I juxtapose that with pterry’s telling Neil Gaiman that his anger is what’s made him a bestselling author.

And yeah, you know what? These books are angry. Vimes is angry and Susan is angry and Granny Weatherwax is angry, and the entire Monsterous Regiment is angry, and sometimes Adora Dearheart is angrier than all of them. Moreover, Tiffany can’t become a witch until she’s willing to be angry.

You have to do the right things with your anger. You have to drag goblin-killers to justice, not get drunk and fight the gutter. You have to tell the football gangs to shove it, not tell your best friend to walk away from fame and fortune. But anger is what changes the world.

And Pratchett’s anger resonates with us, and makes us recognize our opportunities to change the world. We read these books and we catch the anger like a disease, and discworld shapes it like a mold, and so his anger goes on living, goes on revolutionizing, even after he dies.

GNU Terry Pratchett

[petermorwood]

“It’s better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness.”

[delicious-dream-before-the-storm]

The band, the music, the dance.

puts on sound 📣🎶🎵

[amorphousturtle]

Ok, I NEED you to understand just how insane even ATTEMPTING this was for them.

1. Playing an instrument is difficult. Doing so in sync with others even more so. Don’t think I’m stepping on any toes saying that.

2. Dancing is difficult. Doing so in sync with others even more so. Still not controversial.

3. YOU AVOID, AT ALL COSTS, MOVING YOUR BODY WHILE PLAYING A WIND INSTRUMENT.  To make the correct, pleasant sounds, you need to be in the correct form. And that form involves your ENTIRE body, even your legs when sitting down.

4. “oh, but I’ve seen marching bands before and-” MARCHING BANDS HAVE ENTIRE SCIENTIFIC FIELDS DEDICATED TO FIGURING OUT HOW TO MARCH WITH MINIMUM BREAKING OF PROPER FORM. A marching band tries to be as smooth as possible while moving, so as not to jar their instrument, mouth, neck, arms, torso, or anything else.These ladies and gentlemen are BOUNCING and still playing properly, what the FU-!

5. AND ANOTHER THING! Wind instruments and dancing BOTH make demands on your breathing, so the fact that they are dancing (making you breath faster for extra oxygen) AND playing wind instruments (making you effectively hold your breath) AT THE SAME TIME is HUGE. Their lungs must be MASSIVE.

[thejollywriter]

All of that also; the song is Sing, sing, sing (with a swing). If you wanna listen to some of THE SPICIEST big band ever recorded. Its a big hard song and this band does it expertly.

[tropics777]

And in these next 50 years you will eat so many delicious meals, laugh so many times with so many people you love, shout and scream and sing and cry and smile so hard your face hurts. And you will see such beautiful sunsets and feel fresh cold air on your face and feel warm and safe wrapped up in your favourite winter coat.

[wizard-council-bureaucrat]

I wrap this blessing around you like a shroud, so that no ill can find you, and every warmth is held close

[buried-in-stardust]

Using mortise-and-tenon joints to build an entrance way with 35m width × 6m depth. According to other sources, this is in Longnan, Gansu, and was built by 36 carpenters and 4 mortise-and-tenon experts over 6 months, costing around 5M yuan in total.

[kyleesarthell]

Recollection (1/2

[mumblesplash]

it’s so magical and beautiful that there are sprawling interconnected cave systems carved deep into the earth by various geological forces and you don’t have to go in them. there are miles and miles of stone passageways in total darkness that require you to exhale all the air out of your lungs to squeeze through parts of them and you don’t have to be there. some of these squeezes are underwater and require cave divers to take off their oxygen tanks and push them through ahead of them and me i am above ground looking at the sky as we speak. there are untold subterranean wonders no human has ever seen and i will not be the one to discover them #grateful #blessed

[mumblesplash]

so true there could be any number of undiscovered species down there all of which are none of my business and never will be. peace and love on (the surface of) planet earth 💕

[boethiah]

hi, i'm a final-year phd student who researches caves. reading the notes section of this post made me realise that a lot of people probably don't have a good familiarty with speleology and caving more generally, so i wanted to clarify a few of the points that've come up:

*why can't we just use robots to go into the caves?*

the technical answer to this  is that  we don't really have good remote-control signals that can penetrate rock. cave radios and geolocation are active areas of research and even getting a simple radio signal through anything deeper than 100m of rock is nearly impossible. the other option is to feed a cable through, which becomes very impractical very quickly, as caves can be kilometres long. caves are also hostile environments to technology, often muddy and/or partially flooded. even if you could engineer a way to remote-control a robot inside a cave, to design one that could withstand the cave environment would be prohibitively expensive.

*but why do people need to go into the cave at all?*

the main reasons include: to install and retrieve cave loggers (e.g. temperature and humidity loggers); to collect samples (dripwater, sediment, and speleothems for paleoclimate analysis); to excavate or document archeological material; to survey for cave mapping.

cave monitoring (the  first point) is particularly important for my field, paleoclimate reconstruction. we can use the chemical composition of stalagmite layers to determine what the environment was like in the past, sometimes up to millions of years ago. however, these proxies (chemical signals that reflect environmental channge) are strongly influenced by the cave environment itself. without knowing how the cave environment responds to the wider climate, we don't know what that environment did in the past.

*going into caves destroys the scientific value of the caves*

entering caves does inevitably perturb the environment, and this is something speleologists have to consider while doing research. however, the scientific value of caves far exceeds the cave environment. cave-based paleoclimatology is how we know what the asian monsoon did in the  far past and how droughts have contributed to many civlisational collapses in early- and prehistory. cave research is how we know we weren't the only species of human to make fire and art. the human understanding of the world would be so much poorer without the contributions of cave science.

*but spelunkers just do it for fun*

every scientific caving expedition i've been on has been lead and facilitated by local cavers. local cavers are the ones who know the caves best. they put in the immense time and resources to visit these caves, make them accessible, map them, maintain monitoring equipment, and-- critically-- serve as custodians for the caves. most science benefits massively from local community participation, and science that's walled off from community participation isn't worthy of being science. without these people "just doing it for fun", speleology wouldn't be possible. we owe an immense debt to local cavers and any good speleologist will include them in the research process.

i do understand why caving repels some people-- i spent yesterday squeezing through tiny holes and getting absolutely drenched in mud-- but the scientific and cultural value of caves should never be overlooked. humans have been so drawn towards caves through our existence that  they still preserve our oldest artwork. to try and stop people from caving would be a tragedy akin to ending the hobby of mountaineering or forbidding everyone from ever visiting a desert. caves matter

[ghostowlattic]