Gouffre du Neve

The entrance widens vertically into a large double shaft, formed through the Urgonian beds, actively fractured in this faulted sector of the massif. a ledge 15 metres below the entrance, still lit by daylight, allows one to gain a footing on a large, steeply inclined scree slope. The crumbling slope steepens, covered by a slippery mantle of dirty snow and melting ice, and spills abruptly into a gigantic abyss girdled over 3/4 of its circumference by an underground glacier, whose mass plunges down an absolute vertical of 100 metres in depth. a narrow and providential ledge, today freed of ice, whose stratified thickness on the opposite side weakens with descent towards 30 metres below the lips of the shaft, reveals nothing but rock down to the bottom of the vertical, occupied by a debris cone maintained by snowfalls. The cavity then descends again between rock and ice over a vertical of 35 metres. The walls narrow and give way to another shaft of 38 metres, at the bottom of which, at the level of a ledge, two joint-controlled networks divide, leading to the end of the pit, established for the deeper one at 220 metres below the surface (P8 and P17) and for the other (P 18) at 215 metres of depth.

The Gouffre du Névé is not merely a simple mass of hardened snow buried in the darkness of the cave, but a true underground glacier, where enormous thicknesses of stratified living ice remain suspended over the vast mouth of an abyss about a hundred metres high. In twenty years, this enormous glacier has lost nearly 40 % of its initial volume; the névé still shown on the surveys of the Spéléo Club de Savoie (SCS) towards the bottom of the 95-metre shaft practically no longer exists. Only a patch of ice remains at the start of the fault that extends the pit downwards, fed by snow absorptions that still occur in winter, but in lesser and irregular proportions, bearing witness to the slow and pitiless warming of the climate of our planet begun several decades ago now.

The exploration of the precipice is divided here into a single and vertiginous rush of shafts. This visit also highlights the slow processes of the zones of absorption arranged in the limestones by gravity, which, as in the neighbouring caves of the Grand Glacier, demonstrate the full extent of the engulfment of glacial tongues that once penetrated into the underground of caves.

This pit, one of the most remarkable of the Alpe massif, is particularly suited to preserving considerable volumes of ice in its flanks, a true conservatory of the vestiges of the last autochthonous glaciers of the Quaternary that submerged the Chartreuse massifs during the Würmian eras. It is therefore not without profit to descend these verticals, for outside the purely sporting context, curiosity is naturally sharpened by the presence of this glacier engulfed for long geological periods. Despite all the efforts made by cavers to discover extensions leading to the collector of the Alpe network, the Gouffre du Névé, with its P100, remains one of the most beautiful verticals of the massif with which one can measure oneself.