Next week, if all goes according to plan, a small mountain of snow will be melted, repeatedly sterilised and then injected in a high-pressure stream of near-boiling water to clear a bore-hole through the two miles of the ice-sheet.
"The idea is that the same thing is true for colors, that there are certain kinds of colors that are characteristic of stuff that's good for us as a species -- clear sky, clear water -- and stuff that's bad for us, like rotting foods, biological waste products, " he said.
Gorges and karst plateaux feature 700 caves, hundreds of sinkholes, a 9-km-long thermal-water maze under a town and more than 1, 600 clear-water springs.