Heaven’s Cave is located in the centre of the Phong Nha-Ke Bang national park, about 500 km southern from the Vietnamese capital and 40 km from the city of Dong Hoi. Phong Nha-Ke Bang national park ...is protected also as a UNESCO world heritage site. Due to weak economic situation in this region as a result of lack of natural resources, karst tourism represents an important opportunity for raising the quality of live in the province. A proposal to adapt non-touristic Heaven’s Cave for tourism was presented to Karst Research Institute ZRC SAZU in 2006. Because the caves are sensitive ecosystems and all activities in them should be carefully implemented, our task was to make basic survey and map the cave, to perform a speleological and touristic research, to propose possible interventions for adapting the cave for tourism and to prepare a strategy for tourism development in this area. The latter should also show us if some interest is present among tourists for new show cave in this region. From this point of view this study does not represent systematic long-term approach for adapting a cave for tourism but rather a short study of a cave with potential to be show cave in remote area of Central Vietnam. Approach used in this study should be used in similar environments as a first step to estimate if weakly known cave is environmentally and economically suitable for development for touristic purposes.Keywords: Heaven’s Cave, Thien Duong Cave, Phong Nha-Ke Bang, Vietnam, show cave.
•Copper sensors were used for monitoring corrosion in bentonite during 4.2-y exposure.•Corrosion rates were estimated by applying three different methods.•Average corrosion rates for copper in ...bentonite are several µm/year.
Copper corrosion in saline solutions under oxic conditions is one of concerns for the early periods of disposal of spent nuclear fuel in deep geological repositories. The main aim of the study was to investigate the corrosion behaviour of copper during this oxic period. The corrosion rate of pure copper was measured by means of thin electrical resistance (ER) sensors that were placed in a test package containing an oxic bentonite/saline groundwater environment at room temperature for a period of four years. Additionally, the corrosion rate was monitored by electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) measurements that were performed on the same ER sensors. By the end of the exposure period the corrosion rate, as estimated by both methods, had dropped to approximately 1.0μm/year. The corrosion rate was also estimated by the examination of metallographic cross sections. The post examination tests which were used to determine the type and extent of corrosion products included different spectroscopic techniques (XRD and Raman analysis). It was confirmed that the corrosion rate obtained by means of physical (ER) and electrochemical techniques (EIS) was consistent with that estimated from the metallographic cross section analysis. The corrosion products consisted of cuprous oxide and paratacamite, which was very abundant. From the types of attack it can be concluded that the investigated samples of copper in bentonite underwent uneven general corrosion.
Even some recently published works including manuals, textbooks and lexicons, related to this topic contain inexact, not precise, discordant or wrong statements. Recent linguistic studies provide ...some new results regarding the word karst. The paper repeats some well known facts about the origin of the term karst but at the same time it gives some new results and interpretations. The name of the plateau in the background of the Trieste Bay (the Adriatic Sea) which the Slovenes call Kras, Italians Carso and Germans Karst is of pre-roman origin and Latinised into Carsus. The original name had the base *Karus- (Ptolemy wrote Kαρουσαδίω óρɛι) from the root *kar- meaning rock, stone. From the Latinised form Carsus developed Slovene, Italian and German names according to the rules of their languages. From the Central Europe the easiest and practically the only way leading to the Mediterranean was the road from Vienna to the port of Triest. Travellers across the Karst described this unusual country and its natural phenomena, mostly with negative connotation and subsequently other limestone landscapes were compared to Karst. In 1830 F. J. H. Hohenwart wrote that “karst is not on the Karst only, but it stretches from the plain of Friuli to the Greek islands. Most of the descriptions of the Karst from that period were published in German language and this is the reason why the German form of the name became the international karstological term, the karst.
En 1947 fut créé l'Institut de recherches sur le Karst à Postojna (Slovénie). Mais 40 ans avant, le projet avait déjà germé dans l'esprit d'I.A. Perko, directeur de la grotte de Postojna. Entre 1910 ...et 1912, il mobilisa les chercheurs européens intéressés par le karst, les administrations impériales autrichiennes, et tous ceux qui avaient visité et admiré la grotte. Parmi eux se trouvait E.-A. Martel, qui connaissait bien les cavernes de Slovénie et qui les avait explorées. Même si les vicissitudes de l'histoire retardèrent la réalisation de cet Institut, cet épisode illustre bien les liens qui s'étaient tissés à l'époque entre la Société de Spéléologie créée et animée par Martel et les chercheurs qui travaillaient sur la «terre classique des cavernes».
I.A. Perko, E.-A. Martel and the International Institute of Spelology in Postojna (Slovenia)
In 1947 was created the Institute for Karst researches in Postojna. But this idea was first supported, 40 years before, by I.A. Perko, director of the tourist cave of Postojna. Between 1910 and 1912, he called out all the European Karst scientists, the Austrian imperial services and the former admiring visitors of the cave. Among them was E.-A. Martel, who had explored caves in Slovenia in 1893 and in 1896. Even if the ups and downs of History delayed this project, it shows the strength of the relationships between French and Slovenian cavers.
From relatively scarce descriptions of Dinaric Karst the author has chosen three examples: the diary of B. Kuripečič, the interpreter of the Austrian emperor diplomatic mission to the Turkish Sultan ...in Istanbul; the diary of Turkish traveller, diplomat, and soldier Evliya Çelebi; and the travel report of a researcher from the Enlighten period, B. Hacquet. In 1531 the first one published his diary where just two karst phenomena are mentioned. Evliya Çelebi wrote his diary during the great part of the 17th century and it contains numerous mentions and shorter descriptions of karst phenomena, mainly in terms of traveller’s and soldier’s point of view. B. Hacquet who considered himself as a chemists or “geologist” (in modern sense of the word) wrote the most about Dinaric Karst in his travel book on the “Physical-political Travel from Dinaric through Julian … to Noric Alps” (1785) and in the description of Carniola, “Oryctographia carniolica...” (1778-1789). He is one of the first known to use the term Dinaric Alps. At the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century there were more and more descriptions of this part of the Balkan Peninsula, let me mention only the well known A. Fortis’ work (1774).
The second book in the new collection Karstology in Development Challenges in the Karst brings together the findings obtained in planning and construction of motorways in the Karst. More than 350 new ...caves were opened up in the final wave of construction. This was followed by studies on arranging karstic features for tourism and their management. We also selected studies on karstic ecology, in which we made use of biological and microbiological research. At the end there is a summary of everything we need to take into account in planning different encroachments in karstic areas.
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