Name: Vietnam's Son Doong cave is big enough for a skyscraper to fit inside | 60 Minutes
Uploaded: 2026-03-30T21:33:52.000Z
Duration: 13 min 6 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Imagine, in the 21st century, discovering a marvel on par with Mount Everest or the Grand Canyon.

It happened in 2009 with the revelation of the largest cave passage in the world.

It's in Vietnam, and they call it Hang Son Doong, Mountain River Cave.

An intrepid British explorer, Peter McNabb, led the first team through this epic underworld of caverns the height of skyscrapers.

McNabb is to caving what Armstrong is to the moon: the first explorer.

Recently, we asked McNabb to show us this wonder of the world.

But before we begin our trek, we really have to show you a preview of where we're going.

This was the moment Son Doong caught us in its grasp.

Sunbeams cascading 120 stories from a break in the ceiling.

Groundwater above us slipping through the light like rain.

And rock reflecting what seemed like the only sound in the world.

Not many have stood in this space that transcends time.

It was a reward for our journey that began days before.

The only way to Son Doong is on foot, a trek of a day and a half.

We had a party of 53 moving in groups, mostly porters, heaving camping and TV gear, plus experts in safety and climbing.

There were 20 river crossings, water flowing through limestone, two of the essentials for building caves.

This is the slender center of Vietnam, the Chu Son Range between Laos and the South China Sea.

We were following the Vietnam War's Ho Chi Minh Trail through a jungle where tigers are not unknown and leeches are plentiful.

Leading us were explorers Howard Limbert, whose work in Vietnam over 30 years discovered 500 caves, and

Peter McNabb, whom Limbert sent to be the first in Son Doong.

I find it an adventure going exploring and not quite knowing what's around the corner and just sort of finding your way through.

And things reveal themselves, like big chambers, big passages, or tight, narrow bits, beautiful formations.

And there aren't a lot of places on Earth that you can discover for the very first time.

No, you have to look pretty hard for them.

You have to look pretty hard for the entrance to Son Doong.

You'd hardly notice, but for the writing on the wall proclaiming the miracle of Hô Can.

In 1990, Hô Can, a villager, discovered this entrance after he sheltered here from a storm.

and I felt something strange." The strange feeling was wind blowing out of the ground.

Cavers know that's the breath of a tremendous cavern.

In 2000, the British Cavers asked young Hô Can to show them, but it took eight years.

In 2008, "I finally found it," he told us.

We're just inside, looking back toward the entrance above.

The first obstacle is a spectacular 30-story wall that our climbing team showed us how to descend.

Darkness would be nearly total, but we lit it so you can see.

In 2009, he and four others on his team were dropping into darkness.

There's an obvious big black hole where you're heading towards,

and you just sort of skirt around and look around and find, "This way is pretty good.

This way works." Quite often, you get stopped.

You just basically feel your way through the cave by trial and error.

You had no idea what was beyond the light on your helmet.

Every corner you went around was completely new, completely exciting,

and it just kept getting better and better as you went into the cave.

Spectacular like the entrance we just repelled down.

Look at the two men halfway down holding lights.

At the very top is the entrance and the last daylight we would see for a while.

At the bottom of the climb, we met the architect of Son Doong, the Rao Tung River.

Its waters are acidic, so it's really good at dissolving limestone.

Well, this is a pretty good setting for an interview.

In camp, we spoke to Purdue University geologist Darryl Granger, who came here in 2010 to figure out when the river started its project.

We found a nice package of sediment further in the cave,

and that dated to about two and a half million years ago.

That's when the river first found a tiny crack in the limestone ridge.

The water started flowing through it, dissolving it bigger and bigger and bigger.

We still have water going through it today, so it's continuing to get bigger as we speak.

Our exploration of the cave took three days and two nights.

It's 65 stories tall and the width of one and a half football fields.

The Great Pyramid of Giza would fit easily.

A 747 could fly through the biggest passage and not scrape a wing.

Sometimes the only way forward was the width of our shoulders.

But we noticed in the broadest caverns, you often lose the sense of even being underground.

Roughly halfway, there was a light ahead.

There are two skylights where the roof collapsed.

For us, a break from total darkness and a chance to show you the scale.

And this do line formed because the roof over our heads, the limestone, is a little bit thinner here than it is in the rest of the cave.

Then, as the cave grew wider and wider and wider over millions of years, it was unable to support the roof above.

What's remarkable about it is that it allows light into this cave that would otherwise be utterly dark,

and it allowed the jungle to come inside the cave.

Like everything else about the cave, this do line is enormous.

In other words, about the height of a 45-story building.

We stopped here with Howard Limbert, who's explored Vietnam since the '90s.

When my producer, Nicole Young, suggested the story, I turned her down.

I said, "Nick, it's a hole in the ground." What was I missing?

You're missing the best adventure that happens in the world.