Speleothems are valuable continental archives of past environmental and climate changes. This is firstly due to the fact that speleothems contain much information on these changes, through many complementary proxies and secondly that speleothems can be dated very precisely. The session aims to highlight the most recent developments and findings of this multifaceted archive and frames all fields of speleothem research - the understanding of this multi-proxy record and its dating techniques. Proxies include petrography, isotopic, isotopologic and elemental composition, fluid inclusion composition, biomarkers, and growth dynamics.
Furthermore, the session explores their relationship with environmental and climatic variables, via the monitoring of cave environments and the study of the vadose zone above caves as well as the modeling of deposition processes or of surface-cave-speleothem transfer processes. These informations are often crucial for a robust interpretation of the speleothem archive and it is this integrated study, which leads to a better interpretation of speleothem records and provides chronologically well-constrained information on past climate and environmental changes and/or human occupation. This session welcomes all studies from monitoring, modeling (including isotope-enabled climate models), proxy-development and analysis of speleothems and speleothem proxies that advance our capacity to make palaeo-environmental reconstructions from speleothems. It also welcomes newest speleothem records or information retrieved from speleothem studies.