Student Researcher Freed From Cave After Becoming Stuck Three Miles Underground

It's a claustrophobe's worst nightmare.

Three miles into an overnight research trip through an expansive Tennessee cave, a Vanderbilt student fell so ill he was unable to return, prompting a massive rescue effort from first responders.

The emergency call came in a little before 11am on Saturday, according to local reporting. The Vanderbilt group embarked on a geochemical field trip sometime on Friday afternoon through the Blue Springs Cave in White County, Tennessee, before the unnamed student became ill deep within the Earth.

The joint rescue operation lasted nearly nine hours, and included at least 12 emergency agencies.

"We were thinking it might be a multi-day rescue," said a spokesperson for the Hamilton County Rescue Squad, which responded to assist White County first responders.

Like all cave rescues, the nature of the mission was tricky. They typically require careful planning, constant communication with the victim, and a small army of expertly trained emergency workers and volunteers familiar with the intricacies of various cave systems.

After traversing over two miles, rescuers then had to crawl through nearly 2,000 feet of tight, winding passage to reach the ailing caver. Once a medical team met with the student, they rendered aid and plotted a course out, maintaining contact with the surface crew via a wired phone.

Though they were prepared to carry the student out on a portable stretcher known as a skid — a common and laborious tactic for cave rescuers — he was largely able to make it out on his own. By 9pm Saturday, all student researchers, professors, and rescue personnel had exited the cave.

"This would have been a tough carry out through small passages," the Chattanooga-Hamilton County Rescue Service said in a statement, "but the patient's condition had improved significantly. We were prepared to orchestrate an otherwise long rescue, but the patient was able to walk, and sometimes crawl out on their own."

As the longest cave in Tennessee, it's probably no wonder Blue Springs Cave attracts throngs of student groups and private cavers alike. The system sprawls for an incredible 37 known miles, making it the 9th longest mapped cave in the contiguous United States. It's the subject of its own book, cleverly named "Blue Springs Cave," which notes that the true length of its labyrinthine caverns was only discovered as recently as 1989.

Since then, it's been the subject of research expeditions, survey efforts, and even cave diving missions, the latter of which connected the system to a nearby natural spring in 2011. It's one of a few Tennessee caves where Ice Age jaguar footprints have been discovered, preserved for tens of thousands, if not millions of years.

"Blue Spring is a great place to do research, in large part because the owner, Lonnie, is very helpful and open to allowing us into the cave," said Jessica Oster, a professor of earth and environmental sciences at Vanderbilt. Though she wasn't involved in this particular trip, Oster's spent plenty of time in Blue Springs Cave, collecting water samples to track chemical changes in the system over time. "It's a great place to discuss cave formation and geology," she told Futurism.

It's not the first incident reported at Blue Springs Cave. In 1998, a caver slipped while passing "Hanson's Crossing" — a treacherous rope bridge situated near a 150 foot waterfall — nearly plummeting to certain doom. Luckily, fellow cavers came to her rescue, hoisting her up as she clung to the rope bridge for dear life.

As that perilous (if awe-inspiring) passage is a little under five miles in, the Vanderbilt student presumably didn't get far enough to see it, but it's probably for the best. There's always next time.

More on caves: Scientists Find Signs of Life Deep Inside the Earth

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