What are Some Common Cave Features?

The world’s caves contain numerous beautiful and mysterious formations for anyone brave enough to venture into them. There are the obvious ones – stalactites and stalagmites – but also soda straws, flowstone, columns, curtains, helictites, ringstone dams, cave corals, and many others. These formations are called speleothems, from the Greek spelaion for cave and thema for deposit. Cave formations grow slowly, about a centimeter per year or less, requiring centuries or millennia to create the amazing forms we can see today. The most familiar cave formations are the stalactite and the stalagmite. Stalactites form from soda straws, hollow, elongated tubes of calcite (calcium carbonate) formed as water drips down from a hole or crack in the ceiling. Each drop of water deposits a tiny bit of calcite, and over time it gets built up. The material is called dripstone. When a soda straw gets large enough, it becomes a stalactite. A stalagmite is a complementary cave feature that forms on ...  more

The world’s caves contain numerous beautiful and mysterious formations for anyone brave enough to venture into them. There are the obvious ones – stalactites and stalagmites – but also soda straws, flowstone, columns, curtains, helictites, ringstone dams, cave corals, and many others. These formations are called speleothems, from the Greek spelaion for cave and thema for deposit. Cave formations grow slowly, about a centimeter per year or less, requiring centuries or millennia to create the amazing forms we can see today. The most familiar cave formations are the stalactite and the stalagmite. Stalactites form from soda straws, hollow, elongated tubes of calcite (calcium carbonate) formed as water drips down from a hole or crack in the ceiling. Each drop of water deposits a tiny bit of calcite, and over time it gets built up. The material is called dripstone. When a soda straw gets large enough, it becomes a stalactite. A stalagmite is a complementary cave feature that forms on the ...  more