Caves have an annoying habit of making geology vocabulary sound made up: helictites, moonmilk, cave pearls, soda straws, showerheads, shelfstone, rimstone, and something genuinely called cave popcorn.
The Virtual Cave turns those names into a photographic field guide.
The project dates to the mid-1990s and has been maintained for years by cave photographer Dave Bunnell. Its pages document cave formations and underground environments using photographs, explanations, and linked indexes rather than a generic overview of caves.
The result is one of those specialist sites that quietly becomes a reference source.
Underground geology needs pictures
Knowing that a stalactite hangs from the ceiling is easy. Distinguishing folia, shields, raft cones, gypsum flowers, pool fingers, mammillaries, moonmilk, and helictites is harder without seeing them.
The Virtual Cave organizes formations by type and gives each one its own visual context.
The archive ranges beyond ordinary limestone caves. There are sections on ice caves, sea caves, lava tubes, and other cave environments where different physical processes create entirely different structures.
That depth made the site useful enough to be cited in educational material and geological references. National Park Service documents have referenced Bunnell’s sea-cave material, while teachers have used the site as an interactive introduction to stalactites, stalagmites, and cave systems.
The site also reflects an older educational-web instinct: if something is difficult to explain in words, photograph every version of it and build a linked catalog.
For cavers, geology students, photographers, teachers, and people trying to identify a formation from a trip underground, that is much more useful than a page containing the usual five cave facts.
This site was found in CacheRat’s broader Ancient Web research corpus.
Explore the 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list
The Virtual Cave makes the underground world searchable one weird mineral shape at a time.