Movile Cave

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Movile Cave (Romanian: Peştera Movile) is a cave in Constanţa County, Romania discovered by Cristian Lascu in 1986 a few kilometers from the Black Sea coast. It is notable for its unique groundwater ecosystem rich in hydrogen sulfide and carbon dioxide but very poor in oxygen. Life in the cave has been separated from the outside for the past 5.5 milion years and it is based completely on chemosynthesis rather than photosynthesis.

48 species were found inside the cave, of which 33 are endemic.

[edit] References

• Jean Balthazar: Grenzen unseres Wissens. Orbis Verlag, München 2003, Seite 268, ISBN 3-572-01370-4.
• Serban M. Sârbu; Thomas C. Kane; Brian K. Kinkle, A Chemoautotrophically Based Cave Ecosystem", in Science, Vol. 272, No. 5270. (Jun. 28, 1996), pp. 1953-1955.

[edit] External links

• The Movile Cave Project
• La Grotte de Movile (fr.)
• Untersuchung der Mikroflora In Movile Cave (pdf, germ.)