You Can Be Anything › All careers › Science & Research
Speleologist
Explores and studies caves — their formation, ecosystems, and archaeological contents.
Did you know?
Bacteria cut off for about 4 million years in Lechuguilla Cave, New Mexico, turned out to be resistant to many modern antibiotics.
How subjects help
- Geology: Read cave walls to understand how water carved out tunnels and chambers over ages.
- Biology: Discover blind fish, insects and bats that are specially suited to life in darkness.
- Chemistry: Explain how dripping water leaves minerals that slowly build stalactites and stalagmites.
- Geography: Survey and draw accurate maps of cave passages so others can explore safely.
A famous name
Édouard-Alfred Martel: Explored about 1,500 caves and is known as the father of modern speleology.
Try it yourself: Scratch-test your pebbles
- Wash and dry your pebbles, then number them on a piece of paper.
- Put one pebble on a table, hold it still and press your fingernail into it with a short digging stroke. Wipe the spot with your thumb: if a groove stays, your nail scratched it.
- If your nail left no mark, try the edge of the coin in the same way. Write down for each pebble: "nail scratches", "coin scratches" or "neither".
- Now line your pebbles up from softest to hardest. A fingernail is about 2 on the hardness scale and a copper coin about 3, so anything neither could scratch is harder than 3.
Geologists in the field use the same scratch test, with a fingernail, a coin and steel tools, as a quick first clue to which mineral a rock is made of, before sending samples to a lab.
Adapted from Maine Geological Survey: Activity 20: Testing the Hardness of Common Minerals.
Also try: Make a mould fossil.
Known for it in
France, USA, Slovenia, Mexico, China