So "discovery" tops all. I was just wondering why sitting on top of a already damaged stal may be seen as worse than completely altering caves in the spirt of exploration. I have done some cave alteration myself in trying to discover new stuff but I know what I did had far more impact on the cave than sitting on a stal.
No discovery does not tops all. But I must say explorers are always walking a thin line there. During exploring you always need to make trade offs to determine if something is worth it or not. I have been involved in several explo's where good signs (airflow fe) where present but where the circumstances in the cave did not allow to continue exploration. In such a situation you need to be strong and stop further exploration, which is not always that easy.
And digging and blasting is always a subject of controverse. I'll give you an example: while exploring a large system post sifon the divers where at the point that further exploration would become to hard/dangerous to continue despite the way on further was open. It was then decided that a new entrance was needed. A spot for a new entrance was searched and found from within the cave using avalanche beepers/arcana tool. Once the spot was located above ground a new entrance was dug open in the form of a 8m shaft to reach the top of chimney that had been located from the inside.
Imo this dig was necessary to let the exploration continue. Was there cave alteration required, sure there was, was there impact, sure there was but we tried to minimase the impact. After the shaft was there we sealed of the shaft as airtight as possible, we also did not allow that the entrance would be come usefull for bats because the new entrance let to a part of the cave that was inaccesable to bats due to the fact that part of the cave was completely situated between sumps.
So it is up to the explorers to determine how far you want to go but taken in account that you need to takethe right actions after the discovery to protect the discovery in the best way knowing that it will cost you time and money to do so.