The first world-wide cave festival, 2002 Samcheok Cave Expo was held from July 10th to August 10th. This expo actually called attention of ordinary people about caves and many international academies approved that Korean caves possess a very important role in cave studies.
However, not many people know that a special institute, "The Korean Institute of Caves", has existed for a long time and, it did remarkable works in Korean cave studies and not surprisingly enough, it also helped the expo academically.
The long history of the institute started in 1970 with the name of "The Academy of Cave Exploration". "The Korean Society of Caves" was in name only at that time and the level of cave studies in Korea was not high enough in comparison with other countries. It was irony that the level was poor because Korea has got good caves to be investigated but the society did not have enough money to carry out researches.
Eventually, the condition gave birth to "The Korean Institute of Caves" and it still leads the cave studies field of Korea.
One of its great works is saving caves and natural environment around Dong River. The Korean government had a serious plan of constructing a new dam in the river although it knew that buiding a dam would seriously damage the nature. Many environmental specialists resisted dam construction but the government was still to force the plan.
So the institute carried out investgations on 20 caves out of 69 in total which were around the Dong River and the investigators concluded that the caves have more value than they thought. These investigations proved the importance of Dong River area even more academically.
Last year, the members of the institute carried out another big investigation at natural caves in Jeju island. With the interest of developing tourism industry, the natural caves of the island were not protected well and the institute tried very hard to preserve the caves in a better condition.
"Members of "The Korean Institute of Caves" did such important works for a long period of time. Investigating and researching caves and dangers always go together. This shows that how much they are in response to the royal summons," said a member of Korean Federation for Environmental Movement. (KFEM)
Nowadays, 6 university clubs are acting actively and people seem to have more interest in caves than before. Cave studies were out of many experts' attention and it was a big obstacle of developing the field of cave studies in Korea. However, the condition of study is getting much better and the institute plans to do more works with international institutes.
"Yes. our institute also had difficult times, but I am pleased that we are able to carry out enough investigations and researching work," added the head of the Korean Institue of Caves.