Scărișoara Cave

Interesting facts

Radiocarbon dating of tiny leaf and wood fragments trapped in the ice suggests the cave glacier is at least 10,500 years old, among the oldest known outside the polar regions.

An ice core about 25 metres long drilled here covers roughly 10,000 years, one of the longest continuous records ever obtained from cave ice.

The ice shows that the region's warmest winters came 7,000 to 5,000 years ago and its coldest during the Little Ice Age, about 150 years ago.

Because the cave sits where Atlantic and Mediterranean weather systems meet, its ice records shifts between the two, filling a rare gap in winter climate data for Europe.

The chamber known as the Church holds more than 100 ice stalagmites, and an ice cliff nearly 18 metres tall rises above the Pool of Ice in the Great Hall.

The Great Hall alone measures roughly 108 by 78 metres, while the whole cave runs about 720 metres long.

Tiny beetles only 2 to 3 millimetres long, cave-adapted members of the genus Pholeuon, live in the frozen cave alongside bats.

In one of the closed research sections, the Great Reservation, explorers found the skeleton of an alpine chamois that had fallen into the cave.

Scărișoara is counted among the Seven Natural Wonders of Romania, and in Hungarian it is called Aranyosfői-jégbarlang.

Emil Racoviță, who explored the cave between 1921 and 1923, discussed its origin in Speologia, his 1927 survey of the science of caves.

Why it is worth it

Scărișoara Cave, known locally as the Ghețar, "the glacier", holds the largest underground ice mass in Romania. It lies at about 1,150 metres in the Apuseni Mountains, at the edge of a forested karst plateau above the Arieș valley. The entrance is a spectacular shaft some 60 metres wide and nearly 50 metres deep, whose floor keeps a thick layer of snow through the year; from there a portal about 24 metres wide and 17 metres high leads into the Great Hall.

The floor of that hall is the top of a block of ice estimated at 75,000 to 80,000 cubic metres and up to about 20 metres thick. The cave works as a cold trap: dense winter air sinks into the shaft and stays there, and meltwater freezes on the surface each winter while the oldest ice slowly melts away at the base. The oldest ice has been dated to more than 10,000 years, and ice cores drilled in 2005 by the Emil Racoviță Institute of Speleology and partners have become an archive of past climate, recording cold and warm years, forest fires and even traces of ancient mining in the Apuseni. Beyond an ice cliff the passage drops to the Church, a chamber filled with ice stalagmites that grow and shrink with the seasons.

The cave was first mentioned in the mid-19th century and first mapped by the Austrian geographer Schmidl in 1863; the Romanian speleologist Emil Racoviță studied its ice in the 1920s. It has been a protected speleological reserve since 1938. Only the entrance shaft, the Great Hall and the Church are open to visitors; the deeper reserves, where ice gives way to ordinary stalactites and flowstone down to about 105 metres below the entrance, are kept for research. Inside the tourist section the temperature stays close to 0 °C, falling to around −7 °C in winter and barely rising above freezing in summer, so warm clothes are needed even in August.

Getting there

The cave belongs to the commune of Gârda de Sus, 32 km up the Arieș valley from Câmpeni on the DN75. From Gârda de Sus an asphalt road climbs about 23 km along the Ordâncușa valley to the hamlet of Ghețar near the cave, and a marked hiking trail of about 10 km offers an alternative on foot. The nearest large town is Brad, about 40 km away as the crow flies, and the nearest airport is Cluj-Napoca (CLJ), about 75 km away.

Scărișoara Cave

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

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