It will never be possible to say exactly how long a cave is. Even in
the simplest cases, the measured length will depend to some extent on
exactly where stations are placed--the extent to which the survey
bounces from wall to wall, for example.
However, if the cave is a dense maze, like Amazing Maze, Aktun Kaua,
or Punkin, it is very hard to exclude unwanted survey length. For
example, if two 1-meter-wide passages meet at right angles and all
four survey shots tie into the same station on one corner of the
intersection, there will be at least 2 meters of survey in that 1-
meter square. This error will be less important in caves where the
intersections are farther apart.
It would probably be possible to find examples in which any suggested
measure of how "long" or "large" a cave is would be misleading.
Deciding which is the largest cave _passage_ in the world, much in the
news lately, is even harder.
At least the depth of a cave is pretty unambiguous, although even here
there can be questions of where the top of the entrance is. There
isn't usually a station on the ceiling of a horizontal entrance, for
example. Another unambiguous measure would be the "diameter" of the
cave--the greatest straight-line distance between two stations. Or one
could compute, God knows how, the volume of the smallest enclosing
convex polyhedron.
--Mixon
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The world did not end yesterday, as I had predicted. I regret any
inconvenience.
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