Alien Cave In Romania | Movile Cave

Filmed from my helmet camera in April 2011 during my second expedition into Movile Cave, Romania. Movile Cave is the only known totally sealed environment on Earth that contains life. The ecosystem is supported (in the total absence of light) by vast floating "mats" of microorganisms that feed on methane and carbon dioxide from the geothermal waters that flow through the Cave, mostly at the expensive of inorganic sulfur compounds and metals present in the waters and the limestock rocks of the Cave.

In this video, I descend the entrance shaft (about 30m) into the abyss where I join Dr Alex Hillebrand of the Emil Racoviță Institute of Speleology (Bucharest) and am then joined by Prof Colin Murrell (then - like myself - at the University of Warwick - though we have both moved on to other Universities). We are assisted by Mr Vlad Voiculescu of the Romanian Group for Underwater and Cave Exploration (GESS) who set the ropes and gave amazing technical and safety support. I was the first scientist from the UK to gain permission to access the Cave and was to my knowledge the 29th person in the world to have been in to this unique, beautiful, amazing and totally sealed environment - more people have been in space!

Movile Cave is located near the city of Mangalia in Romania, close to the Bulgarian border and remains in the custody of GESS. It is a protected site through the actions of the Mangalia City Council and the Romanian Academy of Sciences.
Official Channel: https://goo.gl/j1TDfs