ShowCaveBlog

There is a website operated by the New7Wonders Foundation which is actually a huge poll. More than one hundred million people have already voted for a ranking of world wonders. Now there is a new vote for seven wonders of nature, which means a sort of ranking for biotopes, geotopes and so forth.

We do not know if this is an altruistic initiative or just a way to collect millions of addresses. Please decide yourself if you want to vote.

However, we were astonished today as we learned that many of the top ten ranks are actually karst related. There is Puerto Princesa Subterranean River National Park currently on rank 1, a river cave located on the Philippines, then there is Ha Long Bay in Vietnam, which is actually a flooded tower karst with abundant caves, the Chocolate Hills on the Philippines is also a tower karst area with many caves, Ali Sadr Cave is a show cave in the Iran. This means four of the first ten on the list are karst related. Not too bad….

This is only a snapshot of 01-OCT-2008. For an actual list look at:
 The top 77 candidates of the New7Wonders of Nature Nominees

Cerkniško jezero (Lake Cerknica) is probably the most famous intermittend lake of the world, as it changes its level in a yearly rhythm, depending on the karst ground water level. It was described hundreds of years ago, because of its strange behaviour.

The International Convention on Wetlands was signed in Ramsar, Iran, in 1971. 150 contracting parties commited themselves to the conservation and wise use of wetlands and their resources. 1590 wetland sites are listed in the Ramsar List, with a total area of 134 million hectares. All those sites are wetlands of international importance.

This site tells more about the inclusion of Cerknizka site. I personally enjoyed the great pictures.

Slovenia names intermittent karst lake for third Ramsar site