Abstract
Speleothems are one of the few archives which allow us to reconstruct the terrestrial paleoclimate and help us to understand the important climate dynamics in inhabited regions of our planet. Their time of growth can be precisely dated by radiometric techniques, but unfortunately seasonal radiometric dating resolution is so far not feasible. Numerous cave environmental monitoring studies show evidence for significant seasonal variations in parameters influencing carbonate deposition (calcium-ion concentration, cave air pCO2, drip rate and temperature). Variations in speleothem deposition rates need to be known in order to correctly decipher the climate signal stored in the speleothem archive. StalGrowth is the first software to quantify growth rates based on cave monitoring results, detect growth seasonality and estimate the seasonal growth bias. It quickly plots the predicted speleothem growth rate together with the influencing cave environmental parameters to identify which parameter(s) cause changes in speleothem growth rate, and it can also identify periods of no growth. This new program has been applied to multiannual cave monitoring studies in Austria, Gibraltar, Puerto Rico and Texas, and it has identified two cases of seasonal varying speleothem growth.
Highlights
Most speleothems are made of carbonate which precipitates after CO2 -enriched soil waters have entered an open interior space such as a cave, and diffusive CO2 degassing causes the solution to become oversaturated in calcium carbonate
The seasonal bias is well known in the tree ring climate records because they do not record during the time of non-growth [49]
Tree ring climate records are biased towards the climatic signals occurring during the growth season, and do not record any climate signals during winter, which corresponds to the no StalGrowth results have shown that speleothem growth can be seasonal, similar to other climate archives such as tree rings
Summary
Speleothems (e.g., stalagmites) are secondary deposits occurring in karst settings. Most speleothems are made of carbonate which precipitates after CO2 -enriched soil waters have entered an open interior space such as a cave, and diffusive CO2 degassing causes the solution to become oversaturated in calcium carbonate. Speleothems are important geochemical deposits to reconstruct paleoclimate changes [1,2,3] because they provide long (>100 ky) environmental records that can be sampled at very high resolutions and are generally unaffected by post-depositional diagenetic alteration [1]. A wide range of geochemical proxies, e.g., stable oxygen isotope ratios and trace element ratios, have been interpreted as paleoclimate proxies in many settings [8,9,10,11,12,13,14]
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