In the 1970s, Norwegian cave professor Stein-Erik Lauritzen found water resurging from the mountainside at 60m above sea level. This mountain, called Vegfjellan, sits on Sagfjorden, a fjord in Nordland county, Norway. The 38 kilometres (24 miles) long fjord forms part of the boundary between the municipalities of Hamarøy and Steigen.
In 2016, the first of the 11 Vegfjellan expeditions took place. Expeditions take place twice a year. A summer expedition gives much less harsh dry caving conditions but much higher water flows. The diving exploration has to take place on a winter expedition when water flow is minimal, making caving access much more challenging but diving possible.
Among these finds are a nearly complete skeleton and several isolated elements of the extinct monkey Antillothrix bernensis, the best-preserved primate fossils in the Caribbean. This development has had a great impact on our knowledge of the enigmatic, now extinct Caribbean primate radiation, and it stands to have far-reaching effects on our understanding of the natural history of the region and its much-diminished biodiversity.
Project Antillothrix is a multi-organizational partnership formed to conduct biodiversity surveys and excavations of paleontological cave sites in the Dominican Republic. Together, researchers and divers from the City University of New York (CUNY), Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo (UASD), Museo del Hombre Dominicano (MHD), and the Dominican Republic Speleological Society (DRSS) have documented and collected a trove of vertebrate fossils for study and preservation since the inception of this collaboration in 2011.
Project Antillothrix is a multi-organizational partnership formed to conduct biodiversity surveys and excavations of paleontological cave sites in the Dominican Republic. Together, researchers and divers from the City University of New York (CUNY), Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo (UASD), Museo del Hombre Dominicano (MHD), and the Dominican Republic Speleological Society (DRSS) have documented and collected a trove of vertebrate fossils for study and preservation since the inception of this collaboration in 2011.
03.2020
To further explore and map the cave system within the mountain of Vegfjellan. Now equipped with CCR, divers could continue to push sump 3 in Waterfall Cave with the mission of finding the connection between Crystal Cave and Waterfall Cave, while the support team could search for other cave passages within the mountain. The diving results revealed that sump 3 continued for several hundred more metres, now down to a depth of 45m. At this point, the passageway started the rise, but its destination remains unknown. Further exploration is still needed.
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