Caves: Exploring Hidden Realms (Imax)

Caves: Exploring Hidden Realms (Imax)
by Michael Ray Taylor, Ronal C. Kerbo

Caves: Exploring Hidden Realms (Imax)
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Book Summary Information

Author: Michael Ray Taylor, Ronal C. Kerbo
Edition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2001-03-01
ISBN: 0792279042
Number of pages: 224
Publisher: National Geographic

Book Reviews of Caves: Exploring Hidden Realms (Imax)

Book Review: Where no large-format camera has gone before...
Summary: 5 Stars

CAVES: EXPLORING HIDDEN REALMS by Michael Ray Taylor (0792279042, $35.00) provides some outstanding cave shots from caving experiences around the world. The book accompanies a new film 'Journey Into Amazing Caves' which was released in March 2001: many of the hundred-plus photos are from the film and highlight places no large-format camera has gone before.

Summary of Caves: Exploring Hidden Realms (Imax)

For today's explorer, Earth offers precious few uncharted regions. Even the deepest trenches in the Pacific have been mapped by sonar, and if you venture to the most remote village on the Amazon, you're more than likely to find natives wearing Nikes. The only truly unexplored places that remain -- those that neither humans nor technology has penetrated -- are caves. Until now. In the course of this breathtaking book, Michael Ray Taylor guides an astounding journey into the wonders and hazards of caving. Along the way, he introduces a pair of expert cavers as they tackle the sweeping, awe-inspiring beauty of Greenland's ice caves; the dramatic underwater realm beneath the jungles of the Yucatan; and the vertigo-inducing pits in the wild caves of the American Southwest. Aided by trailblazing IMAX "RM"? camera technology from the award-winning MacGillivray Freeman Films (Everest, Dolphins, The Living Sea), Caves delivers hundreds of vivid, full-color images of places no large-format camera has ever been before and conveys the excitement, terror, and exhilaration of the world's vast and least accessible spaces. Featuring compelling and informative sidebars from leading cave scientists, Caves also includes a Foteword from Ronald C. Kerbo, chief cave specialist of the U.S. National Park Service.
If you were to travel to the Amazon, say, or the source of the Nile, you would likely find the people there wearing corporate logo-branded T-shirts and listening to the latest pop hits on the radio. Using a GPS device or satellite photos, you can track your location just about anywhere on the face of the planet. Given globalism and the ease of travel to once-remote places, where is a would-be flag-planting adventurer to go these days?

The answer, writes Michael Ray Taylor in this intriguing book, is inward: inside the earth by way of the millions of caves that pierce its surface. Following an international team of fellow cavers--men and women in peak physical form and apparently without fear--his narrative takes us deep within the ice caves of Greenland; a vast underground labyrinth of rivers and chambers in Mexico's Yucatan; a cave on a cliff wall overlooking the Colorado River near the Grand Canyon, one that no human had ever before entered; and other great caverns of North America. High-quality (and sometimes astounding) full-color images accompany the text, offering views that usher us into a world of blind snakes, bats, strange geological formations, and uncanny sights that few surface-dwellers have been privileged to see.

Caving is not merely adventure for its own sake, Taylor notes. "Over the past decade," he observes, "scientists have been surprised to learn that in the deepest recesses of the Earth are repositories of exotic microbes ... far more varied in types of species and their individual strategies for survival than all the plants of an equatorial rain forest." Some of these microbes, he suggests, may deliver chemicals for fighting disease; they also deliver important evidence about the history of life on the planet.

But, all that said, caving offers plenty of thrills, and Taylor's book does a superb job of capturing both the science and the adventure of a journey to the center of the earth. --Gregory McNamee

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