Movile Cave
| Movile Cave
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| Location: | Mangalia , Black Sea , Romania | |
| Height : | 3 m | |
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Geographic location: |
43 ° 49 '55 " N , 28 ° 36' 2" E | |
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| Type: | Karst cave | |
| Discovery: | 1986 | |
| Particularities: | Biotope with self-sufficient forms of life | |
The Movile Cave is a cave discovered by Cristian Lascu in 1986 in Romania , near Mangalia , on the south bank of Lake Mangalias, on the Black Sea coast . It formed about 5 million years ago and has been cut off from the surface for at least 500,000 years. The cave atmosphere contains a lot of sulfur and hardly any oxygen . The cave walls of the karst cave are made of clay , which is surrounded by a 25 meter thick layer of limestone . The only access to the cave is a water vein 400 meters deep that is sulphurous. Inside the cave there is an extraordinary ecosystem that contains around 60 primeval animal species that have specialized in the course of time and, for example, have completely regressed eyes or color pigments in the skin. The survivability of this system is ensured by sulfur bacteria , which form a gelatinous coating on the water . On this mass, mushrooms form , which are grazed by the living beings in the cave. It is still unclear how the animals in the cave have adapted to the oxygen-poor atmosphere.
See also
literature
- Jean Balthazar: Limits of our knowledge. Orbis Verlag, Munich 2003, page 268, ISBN 3-572-01370-4 .
Web links
- Brief description with list of species ( Memento from October 19, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) (eng.)
- The animal world (French)