Welcome to the Myanmar Cave Documentation Project
About us
The Myanmar Cave Documentation Project is a group of experienced cavers organized within the Swiss Society for Speleology and the British Cave Research Association. We possess a large speleological expertise which is enlarged by cavers joining from our international partner network. We collaborate with government authorities, NGOs and research institutions.
Our Mission
We actively engage for karst conservation, education and biodiversity research towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Basis is our solid speleological expertise and local know-how about Caves & Karst in Myanmar. All results are published in books or articles, presented at international conferences and made available for subsequent research and other use.
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May 2023 |
The 4th Book on the Karst and Caves of Myanmar is published
The book in the BHB Series
Vol. 84 contains the results from the expeditions from 2016-2020
to Kayah, Kayin, Shan and Mandalay. It contains 92 pages and
many cave maps including Som Hein Cave, the longest cave of
Myanmar in Eastern Shan. Please order the book
here.
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July 2022
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Two papers about Myanmar were presented at the International Speleological Congress in France
The papers highlights how the project contributes to
Karst and Cave conservation and the exploration of Som Hein Cave in Eastern Shan, the newest longest cave of Myanmar.
Please find the papers here: Karst Cave Conservation in Myanmar Som Hein Cave
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May 2020
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New Cave fish from Hpruso Karst
A new fish species named Kayahschistura lokalayensis is described from Hpruso karst area in Kayah State.
The paper is included in the memorial edition for Tony Whitten
from the Natural History Museum of Singapore. Please read it
at
RAFFLES BULLETIN OF ZOOLOGY Supplement No. 35: 179–185
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February 2020
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Hpa- An re-visted in 2020
The British Shepton Team returned to Hpa-An and
continued together with the local Myanmar Cavers the exploration
of caves found in 2019. About 1 km passage was added to now
total 5.3 km from two expeditions. The team promoted cave and
karst protection at a school and gave a public
lecture to students.
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January 2020
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New longest cave of Myanmar
The Eastern Shan expedition surveyed 11.6 km in Som Hein Cave in
Monghpyak. The temple cave is now the longest cave in Myanmar
with several open leads. Left the successful and happy
expedition team with the head monk.
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January 2020
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New snail species from Kayah State
Pseudopomatias phrunoi is a new species of micro snails
described from Phruno Cave in Myanmar’s Kayah State. The
findings are published in RAFFLES BULLETIN OF ZOOLOGY67:
586–594.The full paper is found
here.
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September 2019
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Myanmar joined the Asian Union for Speleology (AUS)
Myanmar was welcomed as new member at the Bureau Meeting of
the Asian Union for Speleogy (AUS) during the Transkarst
Conference in Bohol. Left a picture of the
Myanmar Representatives Nyi Nyi Aung (right) und Joerg
Dreybrodt (left) with Eko Haryono (center left), president of AUS and George Veni
(center right),
president of the International Union of Speleology (UIS).
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September 2019
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The project attended the Asian Transkarst 2019 Conference in Bohol."
A talk was given on the karst and caves of Myanmar with an outlook on karst conservation. Nyi Nyi Aung participated as representative of Myanmar the
Meeting of the Asian Union of Speleology. The presentation is here: Transkarst 2019
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June 2019
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The Expedition Report 2019 is available! The report covers the areas Shan, Kayah and Myeik. It has major maps and many pictures. Enjoy reading it here: Expedition Report 2019
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February 2019
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Event: "Meet the Myanmar Cave Explorers" - Yangon The Facebook invited event Meet Myanmar Cave Explorers was a huge success with a full house with many visitors not only from Yangon but also all the way from Loikaw, Hpruso (Kayah), Hpa-An (Kayin) and Taunggyi (Shan). Thanks a lot for the curiosity on caves & karst. We hope to see you more! 
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15 Feb. 2019
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Presentation of our project to the Kayah State Government in Loikaw
The Chief minister of Kayah state, L Paung Sho, invited us for a
presentation to his cabinet. In 45 minutes we showed the results
of our five years work in Kayah and suggested
subsequent research projects on hydrogeology and implementation
of a karst conservation scheme. The map of Phruno Cave was afterwards used for interactive discussion with the ministers.
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September 2018
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Irrawaddy Article "Caves Are More than Sites for Buddhist Shrines"
The online news Magazine "The Irrawaddy" published an interview
with Ko Nyi Ny Aung from the Yangon Cavers about cave
conservation. Please learn more about this at
Irrawaddy 2018 .
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August 2018
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EuroSpeleo Forum 2018 in Austria
The Karst of Myeik was presented at the 12th EuroSpeleo Forum in Ebensee/Austria.
Close to 700 participants of 40 nations shared in 122 talks the recent developments in karst and cave science.
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July 2018
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Expedition Report 2018 is published
The expedition report contains a summary of surveyed caves
in Mandalay, Shan, Kayah and Hpa-An with first maps and many pictures: Expedition Report 2018
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May 2018
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Fifteen new cave gecko species discovered A team of scientists has found an astonishing fifteen new gecko species within Myanmar’s karst landscapes
based on our book publications.
Dr Grismer notes the sad irony that Myanmar has some
of the most extensive areas of karst in all of Southeast Asia,
yet it is the least protected. “Hundreds of new species could
face extinction without proper management,” he says. More here
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April 2018
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Frontier Magazin Article "Exploring Myanmar’s vast network of limestone caves"
The leading English Magazine of Myanmar, Frontier, published an article about the
projects recent expedition, history and future vision. Please
enjoy reading it at
Frontier 2018 .
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March 2018
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Myanmar 2018 - The expedition finished after a new record of four weeks
The areas of Mandalay, Hopong, Kayah and Hpa-An were explored
from the North to the South. Caves near Pyin Oo Lwin were
documented in cooperation with the nature conservation group
Seinland. The Sam Phu village near Hopong hosted the expedition
afterwards. The team enlarged to 11 with cavers from Yangon and
Mandalay joining for Kayah. The surprise were wet bottomless
shafts in Hrpuso. The Hpa-An tower karst was re-visited in the
last week.
The very welcoming support of the villages and Myanmar Cavers from the training joining opens a new speleological perspective in this country with one of the least explored karst in Southeast-Asia!
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June 2017
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Video of the 1st Myanmar Cave Training
Please enjoy the impressions from the training and feel the
enthusiasm and passion of Myanmar's upcoming young caver
generation. Editing and idea by Win Pye.
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June 2017
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1st Myanmar Cave Training at Hopon
Twenty-two
ethusiastic trainees with background in mountaineering, tourism, university and fauna conservation participated in the 1st Myanmar Cave Training. They studied and
practiced for seven days cave survey, mapping, vertical techniques, fauna identification and karst science. This
intensifies the ongoing systematic documentation of Myanmars
Karst & Caves for biodiversity research, conservation and ecotourism development.
The training was organized in cooperation with
Fauna & Flora International and support of
GiZ, CEPF and Helmsley Cheritable Trust.
The training report is here.
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February 2017
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The Swiss ambassador H.E. Paul Seeger and his wife hosted a dinner reception for the Eurospeleo Team. The documentary "First Steps" was screened the first time in Myanmar to an audience of 40-50 participants.
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February 2017
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The British-American team (left) surveys in cooperation with German Giz caves close to Pindaya. Further areas are explored near Ywangan. The Eurospeleo Team continues documentation in Kayah, Pinlaung and Myeik. Phruno cave is extented in a 12h trip to 4.5 km length. It is now the 2nd longest cave of Myanmar. The Myeik archipelago is entirely crossed. Clusters of limestone with caves located in scenic hongs are found. Both teams document 12 km passage in 60 caves!
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October 2016
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The documentary (30 Min) is released. You can watch it at following events:
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July 2016
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The project will give three lectures at European Caving
Congress "EuroSpeleo 2016":
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June 2016
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The cave maps of Red River Cave and Phruno Cave are published
with impressive pictures. Please have a look on the complete report
at:
Report Kayah 2016. Here the translation of the summary in
Burmese: ၂၀၁၅ ခုႏွစ္ေနာက္ပိုင္းတြင္
ျမန္မာ့သဘာ၀လိုဏ္ဂူမ်ားကို မွတ္တမ္းယူျခင္းစီမံခ်က္ျဖင့္
ကယားျပည္နယ္သုိ့ ဒုတိယအႀကိမ္ သြားေရာက္္ခဲ့ရာတြင္ အံ့ႀသမင္သက္ဖြယ္ ရႈခင္းစံုလင္ေတြ
့ျမင္ခဲ့ရပါသည္။ မယ္စဲ့
မွတပါး အရပ္ေဒသအားလံုးတြင္ အလ်င္အျမန္တိုးတက္လာေသာ
ကားလမ္းဆက္သြယ္မႈစနစ္မ်ားက
လြမ္းျခံဳေနခဲ့ျပီျဖစ္သည္။ေဘာလခဲတြင္ မႏွစ္ကေတြ
့ရွိခဲ့ေသာျမစ္နီဂူသည္ ၄.၁
ကီလုိမီတာ ရွည္လ်ားျပီး ၊ ယခုအခါတြင္
ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံတြင္ အရွည္ဆံုးဂူမ်ားထဲမွ ဒုတိယေျမာက္ဂူ ျဖစ္သည္။ ဒီေမာဆုိျမိဳ႕၏
အေရွ႕ဘက္တြင္တည္ရွိေသာ ခ်ိဳင့္၀ွမ္းမ်ားကုိ စူးစမ္းေလ့လာရာတြင္
ေခါင္းတလားမ်ားရွိသည့္
လုိဏ္ဂူသစ္တစ္ခုကိုအုပ္မိုးထားေသာသဘာ၀ထံုးေက်ာက္ေတာင္တစ္ခုကိုေတြ႔ျမင္ခဲ့ရသည္။ ဖရူဆိုးျမိဳ႕ အနီးတြင္မူ အျမင့္ ၅၀
မီတာရွိေသာ သဘာ၀လိုဏ္ဂူ ၀င္ေပါက္
ထဲသို ႕ စီးဆင္းေပ်ာက္ကြယ္သြားေသာ
စမး္ေခ်ာင္းငယ္ေလးတစ္ခုႏွင့္္အတူ ႀကီးမားလွသည့္ ျမစ္ဂူ
တစ္ခု တို႔ကုိလည္း
မွတ္တမ္းတင္ခဲ့ပါသည္။။ ထိုျမစ္ဂူသည္ စူးစမ္းေလ့လာမႈအဆံုးသတ္သည့္ေနရာထိ
၂.၆ ကီလိုမီတာ
ရွည္လ်ားျပီး ဂူ
၏အတြင္းလမ္းအျမင့္မွာ၂၀-၃၀
မီတာျဖစ္သည္။ ဂူ
အျပင္သုိ ့ ျပန္ထြက္လာႏုိင္သည့္ ဂူေပါက္ကို ၁၀
ကီလိုမီတာ အကြာအေ၀းတြင္ ေတြ႔ရွိရသျဖင္
့အေရွ႕ေတာင္အာရွတြင္ အရွည္ဆံုးဂူမ်ားအနက္မွ တစ္ဂူ ျဖစ္လာႏိုင္ပါသည္။
ကယားျပည္နယ္၏ ျမင့္မားလွေသာထံုးေက်ာက္ဂူသည္ သဘာ၀အေျခခံခရီးသြားလုပ္ငန္းႏွင့္
ဆက္ႏြယ္ေနေသာ ထံုးေက်ာက္ဂူေလ့လာႏိုင္သည့္
ေနရာသစ္တစ္ခုျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း အတည္ျပဳေနပါသည္။
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June 2016
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The 3 minutes trailer "First Steps" made by Phil Bence from the Kayah 2016 expedition can be viewed on Vimeo: First Steps. A documentary follows end of the year.
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February 2016
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The Hpruso-Demeso area west of Loikaw revealed an extremely scenic karst landscape. Highlights are the Phruno Cave with a large river passage of 10 m width and 20 m height was surveyed for 2.5 km with many photos taken. It was surveyed for 2.5 km and resurges likely in Kwaing Ngant Cave in 9 km distance. The cave has the potential to be one of the longest caves in Southeast Asia. The Red river cave discovered in 2015 is documented to a final length of 4.1 km making it the 2nd longest cave of Myanmar.
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November 2015
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Talk at 2nd Asian Transkarst Conference in Lichuan/China The "Karst and Caves of the Shan plateau in Myanmar" were presented at the 2nd Asian Transkarst Conference from 6-8 November 2015 in Lichuan, China.
Over 160 speleologists and geoscientists from more than 20 countries attended and
presented the latest research and speleological explorations in Asia. A highlight was
the inauguration of the Asian Union of Speleology (AUS).
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September 2015
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Presentation at German Annual Cavers Meeting in Berchtesgaden A talk about the latest discoveries was given at the German Annual Caving Society Meeting VdHK eV. near Berchtesgarten on Friday, 4th of September.
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August 2015
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Myanmar Times Interview of Joerg Dreybrodt An interview given to Wade Guyiit from the Myanmar Times about Subterranean Explorations for the August 28 weekend edition. The full article can be read here.
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July 2015
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New focus area "Biodiversity in Karst" Biodiversity in karst is gaining attention due to the highly adapted species living in this special environment. Flora Fauna International (FFI) launched a 3 year karst conservation project inlcuding studies of biodiveristy in cave entrances. The project contributes by sharing its database of 600 karst object under a CC license. More can be read at the 8 page brochure Karst Biodiversity.
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Dinner
Reception as the Swiss ambassadors residence in Yangon 
The
2017 expedition teams return from Pindaya, Ywangan, Kayah and Myeik
Kayah Documentary "First Steps"
Kayah 2016 report is available
