On the weekends, she’s a member of a caving club that discovered the deepest cave in Australia over the weekend of July 31.
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Smart and seven fellow members of the all-volunteer Southern Tasmanian Caverneers (STC) group have officially mapped
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and measured their country’s deepest known cave, which clocks in at 401 vertical meters (1,315 feet).
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It’s located in Tasmania’s Mount Field National Park, northwest of the island state’s capital, Hobart.
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In the small but close-knit caving community, one of the most sacrosanct rules is that whoever discovers the cave gets to name it.
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For the Southern Tasmanian Caverneers, there was only one name suitable for a cave whose depths became apparent during the worst days of the coronavirus pandemic in Australia
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“With Covid, there’s a lot of different words attached to it that are quite descriptive.
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So we were able to go with the whole Covid naming theme for the entire cave,” Smart explains.
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The entrance to the cave, which is tight and narrow, is Test Station Queue.
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Then there’s another claustrophobic section called Close Contact, a sprawling horizontal bit dubbed Superspreader Event and a wide, beautiful part now called Freedom Day.
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While caves have been discovered by pure chance, these days there are many scientific tools that cavers can use to locate their next site and glean information before even descending into the earth.
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Once they narrowed in on a spot, they used dye to pinpoint the location of the cave’s water source – a waterfall deep inside.
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