מלח"ם

Malcham Salt Cave - Malham Cave

Useful Information

Location:	Mount Sedom, Dead Sea. At the road 90 from Jericho to Eilat, at the southern end of the Dead Sea, 4.5 km South of Newe Zohar. (31.0764537, 35.3970705)
Open:	closed. [2021]
Fee:	closed. [2021]
Classification:	Karst Cave
Light:	n/a
Dimension:	L=10,200 m, VR=135 m.
Guided tours:	self guided
Photography:	allowed
Accessibility:	no
Bibliography:
Address:	Malcham Salt Cave,
As far as we know this information was accurate when it was published (see years in brackets), but may have changed since then. Please check rates and details directly with the companies in question if you need more recent info.

History

1986	cave discovered by Amos Frumkin, surveyed for alength of 6 km.
2006	3N Cave in Iran is longer.
2019	cave fully surveyed by an international caver team and again longest salt cave.

Description

מלח"ם (Malcham Salt Cave, Malham cave) is the longest salt cave in the world. It was discoered by the Israeli geology professor Amos Frumkin, the director of Hebrew University’s Cave Research Center, in the 1980s, who also explored it with Israeli cavers. However, they were not very motivated to survey the cave and after they had surveyed 6 km this was the longest salt cave and so they stopped surveying. What they did not suspect: other cavers were more motivated, and so they explored other salt caves and found one in Iran which was longer, and thus became the longest salt cave. This is something quite normal, there is a list of caves with length and depth which is managed by the NSS which always gives the current ranking. And it changes continually with new discoveries. Its nice to be on the list, but its always only temporary. It seems the Israeli were quite annoyed by not being the longest any more and so they organized a massive effort with 80 international cavers from nine countries. There were two 10 day expeditions in 2018 and in 2019. After the cave was finally properly surveyed, 30 years after its discovery, it was again the longest. It obviously took some 13 years after the loss of the first position to finally make a proper survey.

The fact that the longest salt cave title is again in Israel, was published widely, in local and international news. This is quite uncommon, as such news are actually not very interesting, not even for cavers, they normally go unnoticed. And Amos Frumkin denied so vehemently that they did it to give the Iranians the finger, it must be true. And they stated that they "discovered" the worlds longest cave, while they actually had stalled for more than 30 years after its discovery to survey it, which is according to caver codex the first thing to do!

The cave is located only 20 m from the road, see the Google Street View picture below, and it is a small and really easy cave. Unfortunately it is forbidden to enter. So why did we actually list it? Obviously because of the story, and the superlative. But if you would enter carefully, which you would never do because there are signs that it is forbidden, you could see a brownish passage which look quite similar to a passage in gypsum or limestone.