How are caves and stalactites formed?
Water's Stone Sculptures
How are caves and stalactites formed?
Deep underground, in the dark and the quiet, there are rooms no one built. Cathedrals of stone with ceilings that drip and floors that grow upward like slow stone icicles. Nobody dug them out. So who did? The answer is something you've met a thousand times without thinking twice: water. Plain, patient, ordinary water — the world's slowest and most stubborn sculptor.
It starts in the sky, with rain. As raindrops fall, they pass through the air and sink into the soil, and along the way they pick up a little carbon dioxide — the same gas you breathe out. That tiny pinch of gas turns the water faintly sour, like the gentlest squeeze of lemon. You'd never taste it. But the rock underground can.
