Veryovkina Cave is deep and is the deepest-known cave on Earth. Its entrance is situated above sea level in Abkhazia, Georgia. The entrance of the cave has a cross section of, and is located in the Arabika Massif, Gagra Mountain Range of the West Caucasus, on the pass between the Krepost and Zont mountains, closer to the slopes of Mt. Krepost. The depth of the entrance shaft is.
Naming
In 1968, the cave was assigned the name S-115 which was later replaced by P1-7, and in 1986 it was renamed after Alexander Verëvkin. Caver and cave diver Alexander Verëvkin died in 1983 while exploring a siphon in the cave Su-Akan, located in the Sary-Tala massif, now Kabardino-Balkaria, Russia.
Discovery
The entrance is located in the Gagra district of Abkhazia, Georgia.
1968: the cave was discovered by cavers from Krasnoyarsk. They reached a depth of and marked it on the map as S-115.
1982: the cave was discovered for the second time by the expedition of the "Perovo" speleoclub from Moscow. It was marked as P1-7.
1983 - 1986: cavers from the same team continued exploration and reached the depth of.
From 2000 to 2015 the speleoclub "Perovo" and its team "Perovo-speleo" continued research at the cave bottom. Despite all the efforts the cave depth remained at.
August 2015 - cavers from the speleoclub "Perovo" finally discovered a new shaft, but could not explore it because they did not have the rope. This discovery opened the way to a series of later discoveries.
June 2016 - the expedition of the team "Perovo-speleo" took place. The team started from the same point. They surveyed the pit, that was some 30m deep and a small system of passages below. The next day Evgenyj Kuzmin climbed over the wall of boulders and found the head of the Babatunda pit. Its depth was later determined to be. That expedition managed to reach a depth of.
August 2016 - a joint expedition of the "Perovo-speleo" team and the "Perovo" speleoclub reached the depth of.
October 2016 - the expedition of the team "Perovo-speleo" reached a depth of .
Beginning of August 2017 - the speleoclub "Perovo" explored the cave to the depth of. An ancient collector of the karst aquifer system with extensive horizontal tunnels, not typical for the Arabica massif, was discovered. Veryovkina became the second super deep cave and the deepest accessible without diving equipment.
Second half of August 2017 - the "Perovo-speleo" team reached the depth of, thus setting a new world depth record. A huge system of more than of subhorizontal passages below the was discovered and surveyed.
March 2018 - another expedition of the same team added more than a kilometer of tunnels to the cave map. They also measured the depth of The last Nemo station terminal siphon lake. It was and so the total cave depth reached.
