Speleothems (secondary cave carbonates such as stalgmites and flowstones) are remarkable archives of past environmental conditions but can also be used to provide constraints on flora and faunal change through time, human origins, landscape evolution, and much more.
Palaeoclimate
A variety of climate proxies can be found in speleothems. C and O stable isotope ratios respond to variations in precipitation and temperature while more advanced methodologies (e.g. isotope clumping and fluid inclusion isotopes) now offer the prospect of direct determination of absolute temperatures from the Geological past. More...
Geochronology
Landscape evolution
Dating of broken speleothems provides temporal constraints on ancient fault movements (‘speleoseismology’) while speleothems themselves provide evidence of the timescales of karst formation. More...