Sao Chai Tengkong: The World’s Deepest Natural Crater Still a Mysterious Mystery
The outside world was unaware of this natural crater in China until 1994, but experts have not yet been able to find an answer to the question of how this crater came into existence.
Chongqing Municipality is a rural area in southwest China. The verdant land here is home to an astounding natural wonder. From a distance, it looks like the footprints of a giant space creature.
Some experts believe that these mysterious craters may have been exposed as a result of an asteroid hitting the Earth.
On the other hand, there are experts who believe that these pits were not formed suddenly, but the process of their formation began 128 thousand years ago.
According to these experts, the reason for this was the leakage of water which flowed towards the underground river and gradually formed these pits.
How did these craters form? There is no definitive answer to this question, but one thing is certain that with a depth of 660 meters and a volume of about 130 million cubic meters, there is the largest and deepest natural crater in the world, which is called ‘Saochai Tungkong’ in Chinese.
Sauchoy means small village while Tengkong means sky crater.
Inside this pit is a world where 1285 plants and different kinds of animals are visible. They also include animals like the gingko and the clouded leopard.
During the rainy season, a waterfall flows through the crater’s mouth, which irrigates the underground river as well as the caves inside the crater.
Locals have known about this natural crater for centuries, but the outside world discovered it when a British expedition descended in 1994 to survey the caves inside the crater.
The expedition was led by Andrew Jism, whose guide Zhao Guilin explains that the flow of water in the underground river was quite rapid.
In a period of 10 years, five attempts were made to explore the caves inside this pit, but they could not succeed due to the rapidity of the water here.
