Journey Into Amazing Caves

Journey Into Amazing Caves

Publication Date: May 2001

The all-new IMAX Theatre adventure, Journey Into Amazing Caves, opened June 2, 2001. Infinitely mysterious and radical by definition, caves are one of earth's last unexplored frontiers. For those to push their limits in the world's most hostile environments, the risk of fatal danger and thrill of new discovery are the everyday factors that make cave exploration such an awe-inspiring experience.

Journey Into Amazing Caves is a visceral, suspenseful expedition with a new breed of scientists who boldly explore places once thought off-limits to human presence, let alone IMAX cameras. For Journey Into Amazing Caves, these scientists have joined up with a team of intrepid filmmakers to bring back unprecedented footage from unique and forbidding ice caves, underwater caves, and terrestrial caves. Now, for the first time, audiences can squeeze into Earth's alien, hidden realms guided by two women cavers on the quest of a lifetime: daring to enter caves so remote and so threatening, exploring them is like exploring a new planet.

During Journey Into Amazing Caves, audiences will wriggle through tiny, twisting passages, drop into gleaming blue labyrinths of ice, swim through flooded underground vaults, and enter a world so extreme the microscopic creatures who live there are called extremophiles. They will circle the globe, stopping in hot, lush Yucatan; dropping into barren, frozen Greenland and flying above the primitive red rock of the Arizona desert. And they will hold their breath as their expedition leaders, Dr Hazel Barton and Nancy Aulenbach, rappel down steep cliffs into unmapped chambers, hoping to bring back startling new discoveries that may unlock new cures for human disease.

At the heart of Journey Into Amazing Caves is the moving triumph of two tenacious young women who are part of the new movement of extreme athletes and "extreme scientists" - scientists who gather their knowledge and data in treacherous, unforgiving zones of the environment.

Dr. Hazel Barton is a microbiologist who is literally caving to save lives. Like an ancient explorer looking for new worlds, Barton travels the planet's caves seeking undiscovered organisms that might hold new medical applications, including next-generation medicines to treat drug-resistent tuberculosis. There's great promise in research - some cave "bugs" being studied by other scientists already appear to attack cancer cells. Dr. Barton's caving partner, Nancy Aulenbach, is a passionate adventure-seeker, an expert cave rescue and bold pioneer who is looking to expand the limits of what we know about caves - and how to save them from the imminent dangers of pollution and human encroachment.

Journey Into Amazing Caves is narrated by actor Liam Neeson and features songs and performances by the Moody Blues. The film shows at the Louisville Science Center June 2 through December 2001.

For more information, check out their website at: www.louisvillescience.org