Baku, December 5, AZERTAC

Important both for its high biodiversity and for its karst features, Gunung Mulu National Park, on the island of Borneo in the State of Sarawak, Malaysia, is the most studied tropical karst area in the world.

The park is dominated by Gunung Mulu, a 2,376 m-high sandstone pinnacle and the property is the most studied tropical karst area in the world. The geological Melinau Formation contains a remarkable concentration of caves, revealing a geological history of over more than 1.5 million years.

High in endemism, Gunung Mulu National Park provides significant natural habitat for a wide range of plant and animal species, both above and below ground.

The 52,865 ha park contains seventeen vegetation zones, exhibiting some 3,500 species of vascular plants.

Its palm species are exceptionally rich, with 109 species in twenty genera recorded, making it one of the world’s richest sites for palm species. Providing protection for a substantial area of Borneo’s primary tropical forest and a home for a high diversity of species, including many endemics and threatened species, the large cave passages and chambers provide a major wildlife spectacle in terms of millions of cave swiftlets and bats.

The property is home to one of the world's finest examples of the collapse process in karstic terrain and provides outstanding scientific opportunities to study theories on the origins of cave faunas.

The deeply-incised canyons, wild rivers, rainforest-covered mountains, spectacular limestone pinnacles, cave passages and decorations found within the property produce dramatic landscapes and breathtaking scenery that is without rival.

Gunung Mulu National Park has the largest known natural chamber or room -Sarawak chamber, found in Gua Nasib Bagus.

Gunung Mulu National Park is an area of exceptional natural beauty, with striking primary forest, karst terrain, mountains, waterfalls and the largest caves on earth. Sarawak Chamber, the largest cave chamber in the world, stretches 600 m in length by 415 m wide and 80 m high.

With a volume of 12 million cubic meters and an unsupported roof span of 300 m, this chamber dwarfs any other large chamber so far discovered. Deer Cave at 120 to 150 m in diameter is the largest cave passage in the world known at the present time and the Clearwater Cave System holds the world record as the longest cave in Asia at 110 km of mapped and explored passages.

As some of the largest caves in the world they contain fine examples of tropical river caves, flood incuts, vadose, and phreatic caves, exhibiting fine examples of all types of speleothems (structures formed in a cave by the deposition of minerals from water).

Designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2000, the Gunung Mulu National Park is one of Sarawak's most popular travel destinations, and considered as one of Asia’s most unique and thrilling nature destinations with its various caves and karst formations within a mountainous, rainforest and equatorial setting.