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Hang Son Doong: The world’s biggest cave, so ‘outrageous in size’ it fits 2 jungles and the ‘Great Wall of Vietnam’

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Hang Son Doong: The world’s biggest cave, so ‘outrageous in size’ it fits 2 jungles and the ‘Great Wall of Vietnam’

QUICK FACTS

Name: Hang Son Doong

Location: Quang Binh Province, Vietnam

Coordinates: 17.54696024669416, 106.14398574081777

Why it’s incredible: The cave is the biggest in the world and contains two jungles.

Hang Son Doong is the world’s largest known cave, with enough space in some of its passages to fly a Boeing 747 airplane through them. The limestone cavern sits beneath a lush jungle in Vietnam’s Phong Nha-Ke Bang National Park and hosts primeval forests that thrive thanks to giant “skylights” in the rock.

Hang Son Doong cave — the name means “Mountain River” — is young compared with other limestone caves. It formed 2 to 3 million years ago inside the biggest limestone massif in Asia, a colossal block of rock more than 400 million years old that was born from the compressed shells and skeletons of ancient sea animals. Two rivers — the Rao Thuong and the Khe Ry — coursed through cracks in the limestone and eroded the rock, forming a giant tunnel in the massif that only recently came to be known as Son Doong.

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