In the video above, veteran photographer and National Geographic award winner Carsten Peter talks about exploring and photographing Vietnam‘s underworld inside the Sơn Đoòng cave, which is inside the country’s Phong Nha-Kẻ Bàng National Park, close to the Laos border.
The cave was discovered in 1991 by a local man named Hồ-Khanh, but locals were afraid of the cave because of a whistling sound a large, fast-flowing subterranean river made. According to Yahoo.com, it wasn’t until 2009 that a group of scientists from the British Cave Research Association conducted a survey of the cave, finding it is five times larger than the Phong Nha cave, which was previously thought to be the largest in Vietnam. Sơn Đoòng also beat Malaysia’s Deer Cave for the title of the world’s largest cave. Some news outlets have reported that in spots, the cave is large enough to hold a skyscraper. Amazingly, the explorers have just scratched the surface, and still don’t know all that lies in the cave’s depths.
Peter, who returned to the cave with husband-and-wife team Howard and Deb Limpert, who conducted the first expedition, captured many incredible images in depths of the cave and surrounding area. In his talk, Peter quotes Howard Limbert, who said, “to find a giant cave like [Sơn Đoòng] in Vietnam is [like finding] a previously unknown Mount Everest.” See it for yourself in the video above and on the National Geographic website.