The Associated Press

CAVE CITY - For those who'd like to go to school inside a cave, there is the Center for Cave and Karst Studies at Western Kentucky University.

The center sponsors summer field work in Bowling Green, Mammoth Cave National Park, San Antonio, and Carlsbad, N.M.

"Karst" is land characterized by sinkholes, caves and springs. So the center also maps sinkholes in Kentucky and tries to solve other underground mysteries.

The center is "one of the few, if not only, centers in the world to offer training in karst," said education coordinator Leigh Ann Croft. "Our professors come from all over the world."

Six students and two professors recently took part in a weeklong cave ecology course at Mammoth Cave, the world's longest recorded cave system with 360 miles mapped.

One student in White's Cave, which is particularly rich with life, was Patty Ruback, a bat biologist from Chicago.

"This cave's definitely much better in the first 10 minutes than yesterday," she said while admiring a cave salamander.

The instructor was Horton Hobbs III, a biology professor at Wittenberg University in Ohio.

By the time the class left, students counted at least 13 species, including millipedes, beetles, mites, cave crickets, fat cave spiders with huge webs and tiny insects called pseudoscorpions that wave their pincers in protest at being caught.

Later, the students entered Long Cave to look for bats and other creatures, like cross-eyed flatworms.

The university's center is home to three full-time scientists, several graduate students, and up to a dozen undergraduates. The Bluegrass State provides plenty for them to investigate.

"When people think of Kentucky, they think of beautiful rolling hills with basins, like around Lexington," said Nicholas Crawford, the center's director. "What they're thinking of is karst."

In February 2002, Bowling Green saw the state's largest sinkhole, at 25 feet deep and 200 feet wide. City officials turned to the center, which mapped the area and recommended how to fix the problem by filling in a cave beneath the road. The project cost $1 million and took 10 months to repair.

Researchers at the center have taken 27 years of data to put together a map of the groundwater flow under Bowling Green. Such maps are valuable because train wrecks and traffic accidents involving chemicals are particularly hazardous in karst regions, since few streams travel far on the surface before plunging into the ground and flowing through underground passages.

The center also can chart underground voids and offer advice on finding a solid foundation for a road. In addition, the center has assisted with:

• Tracing the source of toxic fumes that were filling the basements of Bowling Green homes and two schools in 1985.

• A sinkhole that opened under a NASA building containing the supercomputers that run the space shuttles in Huntsville, Ala., in the late 1990s.

• A 150-foot sinkhole filled with toxic waste near the town of Rijeka, Croatia. The city's 144,000 people get their water from a karst spring that has so far been uncontaminated. The government plans to spend $20 million to clean it up.

• Massive water contamination in Walkerton, Ontario, in 2000, in which 2,300 people were sickened and seven children died. The center determined the water had come into contact with cow manure and became tainted with E. coli bacteria.