Speleothem archives of palaeoprecipitiation in the Western Mediterranean and Tropical Pacific Seminar

Event details

Speleothem (e.g. stalagmites) provide one of the best opportunities to reconstruct continuous, precisely dated records of the δ18O of rainwater over many thousands of years at seasonal, interannual or decadal resolution. Speleothem also host numerous other proxies that constrain many aspects of environmental change in the atmosphere-soil-karst system and this field of research has seen tremendous expansion over the last decade providing iconic records which clearly reveal, for example, relationships between monsoon intensity and orbitally forced insolation. This talk will introduce work on cave systems in Gibraltar where we are constructing a 500ka reference record of palaeorainfall underpinned by 10 years of cave monitoring. Current work focuses on speleothem cave localities in uplifted reef carbonates along an E-W transect in the SW Pacific where modern precipitation records show the effects of migration of the South Pacific Convergance Zone on interannual and decadal scales. A new seasonally resolved speleothem record from Fiji spanning the transition into the Little Ice Age reveals changes in the interannual behavior of the SPCZ that may be linked to dramatic societal change on the Island around 1200 AD.