It’s funny how much thought people put into remembering stalactites and stalagmites. This is like the definition of trivia, nobody actually needs to know these words. When was the last time you were in a cave and needed to differentiate them?
You should shower less.
Much easier to remember in German -> Stalaktiten -> Titten = boobies -> boobies hang down.
was told this in school, never forgot it 😊
We were taught stalaCtite (ceiling) and stalaGmite (ground).
I always heard it as “-tite” because it hangs tight to the ceiling and “-mite” because it might poke you in the ass
Tight to the ceiling and Might grow to the ceiling here!
Stalagtites hang on tite. Stalagmites crawl on the floor like mites
StalagMITEs MIGHT hang from the ceiling, but they don’t.
stroppy take: Stalactites don’t usually curve and do start out broad and grow down skinny, so really an “m” looks more like stalactites hanging from a ceiling. I’m going to have to forget I ever saw this.
I just remember g for ground and c for cats.
That’s better than the one I learned in school: tits hang.
I’m 46. I can’t tell you hour long it’s been since I heard these terms. They’re completely unimportant outside of a very niche science (but, not entirely useless knowledge).
The stuff about Nutty Putty Cave plummeted my interest in caves to absolute zero (tl;dr caver ends up trapped upside down and his remains are still there and the cave has since closed, real nightmare fuel and not even the only cave it’s happened in).
Your tl;dr makes it sound like they found his body, never bothered to recover it and put a „do not enter“ sign in front of the cave.
It’s much worse than that. He was found while he was still alive and over a hundred rescuers tried to get him out until his heart couldn’t handle it anymore and he died after 27 hours. Only then they decided to leave him there, used explosives to collapse the passage to where he was stuck and then blocked all entrances with concrete.
Yeah, I know…
Sadly that’s the point of a tl;dr, it misses the nuance for people who can’t be arsed to read a whole paragraph.
I will also add that he died because of positional asphyxia. It’s not just that his heart couldn’t handle it. The way we breathe really only works if we’re right side up or laying down. If you’re upside down for a long period of time, your lungs are pushing against your guts and other organs that are pressing down on your lungs. It’s trivial to do for an hour or two, but beyond that, you’re breathing against physics and it just gets harder and harder. He also didn’t have much energy since he worked so hard to get in there. Even if they were able to pipe him sustenance, he couldn’t beat the physics and it was just a matter of time.
They also tried a few things to get him out, but because of the angle he was at, I think they broke one of his legs trying to pull him back out and he told them to stop trying. They were able to lower a phone to him and he was able to speak to his wife and children and tell them he wasn’t coming home, so that had to weigh on him as well.
It’s tempting to think about digging him out. He was underground, so you think “okay so dig.” But it’s rocks, so you can only use demolition (explosive). Explosives push things away, so if you used demolitions to get at him, you’d be crushing him. There’s no magical black hole bomb that just vaporises the rock. You break rocks with explosives by blowing them apart (pushing them away from you). The only way you could use demolition to get where he was would be to drop the explosives in with him, to make a bigger hole. Unfortunately he would be killed in the process and his body destroyed.
So yeah, fuck caves.
Worse than that, they did get him out some but an equipment failure dropped him into a more compromised position
Hmm I always just remembered it with “T for top”
“When the mites come (your leg), up the tights go down”. -my 1980’s chem teacher
“stalagmite’s got an m in it” - hagrid
