Kungur Ice Cave
Interesting facts
- In a 1736 essay on the mammoth, Vasily Tatishchev explained that the giant beast locals said had dug the cave was in fact the extinct mammoth.
- The tallest organ pipe, in the Ethereal Grotto, rises about 22 metres; in all some 146 such shafts pierce the cave roof.
- The Great Underground Lake covers about 1,460 square metres, holds some 1,300 cubic metres of water and is up to five metres deep.
- In severe frosts the air in the entrance grottoes can drop to around minus 30 °C, while the deepest halls stay close to plus 5 °C.
- Perennial ice up to two metres thick covers the floors of the Diamond, Polar, Dante and Cross grottoes.
- The cave lakes shelter Crangonyx chlebnikovi, a tiny crustacean endemic to the local karst and the only animal here with true adaptations to cave life.
- On 13 July 1914, just before the First World War, Princess Victoria of Battenberg, elder sister of the last Russian empress, toured the cave with her daughter Louise.
- On 31 December 1974 a sudden rockfall blocked the way out, and a group of student cavers had to see in the New Year inside a grotto.
- In the great flood of 1979 the Sylva rose almost eight metres and river water seeped into the cave's lower grottoes.
- In earlier floods water poured in so freely that large fish swam into the cave; their skeletons have been found in the clay floor.
Why it is worth it
Kungur Ice Cave lies under the Ice Mountain, a gypsum ridge on the right bank of the Sylva River at the village of Filippovka on the edge of Kungur, in Russia's Perm Krai. It is one of the largest karst caves in European Russia and one of the longest gypsum caves in the world: surveys as of 2021 put its length at about 8.2 km, of which around 2 km were equipped for visitors. Water dissolving the gypsum and anhydrite over thousands of years has produced some 48 grottoes, around seventy underground lakes and more than a hundred "organ pipes", vertical shafts that climb almost to the surface. In the section nearest the entrance, cold winter air is trapped, so the floor stays iced and the ceilings bristle with ice crystals all year; deeper in, the temperature hovers just above or below freezing and the air is saturated with moisture.
The cave has a long written history. In 1703, on the orders of Peter the Great, the Siberian cartographer Semyon Remezov came to map the Kungur district and drew the first plan of the cave, noting crosses and an icon left inside. Vasily Tatishchev visited in the 1720s and 1730s and correctly explained how the voids had formed, rejecting the local belief that a giant beast had dug them. Local tradition holds that early Russian settlers sheltered here from raids and frost, and remains of settlements of the 7th–9th centuries have been found on the Ice Mountain above. Regular tourism began in 1914, when the Kungur native Alexander Khlebnikov leased the site, settled at the entrance and guided visitors for decades; a grotto now bears his name. Later the cave became a scientific station of Moscow University and the Soviet Academy of Sciences, with instruments recording temperature, water levels and crustal movements.
The visitor routes run for 1.5 to 2 km through grottoes with names such as Diamond, Polar, Dante and Ethereal, the last holding the tallest organ pipe.
Getting there
The cave is at Filippovka, about 3.6 km from the centre of Kungur and roughly 100 km from Perm by road. The nearest airport is Perm International Airport (PEE), about 79 km away in a straight line.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Kungur Ice Cave is a karst cave located in the Urals, near the town Kungur in Perm Krai, Russia, on the right bank of the Sylva River. The cave is noted for its ice formations and is a popular tourist landmark.
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