Even in their dark isolation from the atmosphere above, caves can hold a rich archive of local climate conditions and how they’ve shifted over the eons.
Even in their dark isolation from the atmosphere above, caves can hold a rich archive of local climate conditions and how they’ve shifted over the eons. Formed over tens of thousands of years, speleothems — rock formations unique to caves better known as stalagmites and stalactites — hold secrets to the ancient environments from which they formed.
A newly published study of a stalagmite found in a cave in southern Wisconsin reveals previously undetected history of the local climate going back thousands of years. The new findings provide strong evidence that a series of massive and abrupt warming events that punctuated the most recent ice age likely enveloped vast swaths of the Northern Hemisphere.
The research, conducted by a team of scientists at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, appears March 2 in the journal Nature Geoscience. It’s the first study to identify a possible link between ice age warm-ups recorded in the Greenland ice sheet — known as Dansgaard-Oeschger events — and climate records from deep within the interior of central North America.
Read more at: University of Wisconsin-Madison
Then-UW student Cameron Batchelor (left) and Richard Slaughter (right), director of the Geology Museum at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, study cave walls while doing research at the Cave of the Mounds near Blue Mounds, Wisconsin. Batchelor led the analysis of mineral samples to identify a possible link between ice age warm-ups recorded in the Greenland ice sheet. (Photo Credit: Bryce Richter
