Cave of Crystal Giants
By Susan Pettit
By all accounts, it looks like Superman?s fabled Fortress of Solitude, a gigantic crystal cave deep below the surface of the Earth with 50-ton crystals the size of telephone poles. But only a Man of Steel could survive here. Mere mortals would die after just 15 minutes in this prismatic wonderland. Superman’s fictional cave is somewhere in the frozen Arctic, but this real-life version is further south.
In 2000, two miners found the cave more than 1,000 feet below the town of Naica in Mexico’s mineral-rich Chihuahuan desert. The Naica mine, run by the Penoles Group, is one of the most productive lead mines in the world, and a huge supplier of the world’s silver. Mining here is one of the toughest jobs on the planet. Temperatures in the tunnels hover around 95 degrees Fahrenheit.
Brothers Eloy and Javier Delgado were excavating a tunnel when they stumbled upon the entrance to the cave. “What we first saw when we went in was a bar, as if ice,” Eloy Delgado said. “And I went in, I shined the light on it, and it reflected everywhere!”
The miner’s light illuminated a cavern the size of a football field filled with the largest natural crystals in the world.
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