The establishment and development of karst systems depends on many parameters : climatic (CO2, rainfall, temperature), lithology (nature of the rock), structure and tectonics, hydrology (water table, sea level, regional hydrological baseline, origin of waters (autogenic, allogenic, epigenic or hypogenic)).
Changes in these parameters are stored in the karst system, able to preserve this valuable information for millions of years. Their study may be an important contribution to the analysis of palaeoenvironments. During this session all issues dealing with karstogenesis, speleogenesis, methods of dating and palaeoenvironmental analysis in karst (tectonics, biogeography, climatology, prehistory, hydrogeology ,....) will be discussed.

Publication : High quality scientific papers will be submitted to a special issue of the international journal : GEODINAMICA ACTA to be published in 2010.