Speleothems are key terrestrial archives of regional to global paleoclimatic and paleoenvironmental changes on sub-seasonal to orbital scales. They provide high temporally resolved records which can be accurately and precisely dated using a variety of proxies such as stable O and C isotopes and trace elements. Recent efforts have seen the rise in more non-traditional proxies such as fluid inclusion water isotopes, organic biomarkers, pollen, dead carbon fraction etc.. This advancement towards quantitative reconstructions of past precipitation, temperature, or other environmental variables and climate patterns, are key variables for data-model comparisons and evaluation. Beyond this, caves and karst areas additionally host an enormous suite of other valuable archives such as cave ice, cryogenic carbonates, clastic sediments, tufa, or travertine sequences which complement the terrestrial palaeorecord, and are often associated with important fossils or archaeological findings.
This session aims to integrate recent developments in the field, and invites submissions from a broad range of cave- and karst-related studies from orbital to sub-seasonal timescales.
In particular we welcome contributions from:
(1) (quantitative) reconstructions of past climatic and environmental variables to reconstruct precipitation, vegetation, fire frequency, temperature etc. across different climate zones,
(2) field- and lab-based developments of process-based methods to improve our application of proxy variables,
(3) process and proxy-system model studies as well as integrated research developing and using databases such as SISAL (Speleothem Isotope Synthesis and AnaLysis).
We further welcome advancements in related and/or interdisciplinary areas, which pave the way towards robust (quantitative) interpretations of proxy time series, improve the understanding of proxy-relevant processes, or enable regional-to-global and seasonal-to-orbital scale analyses of the relationships between proxies and environmental parameters. In addition, research contributing to current international co-ordinated activities, such as the PAGES working group on Speleothem Isotopes Synthesis and AnaLysis (SISAL) and others are welcome.