Speleothem Records and Climate

Dear Colleagues,

Given their extremely high temporal resolution and the excellent opportunities for dating, speleothem records provide a unique opportunity for assessing climate change on various spatial and temporal scales, over the last 21,000 years and beyond. The different measurements made on speleothems, including the stable isotopes of oxygen and carbon (δ¹⁸O, δ¹³C) and various trace elements, are widely used to reconstruct local changes in the hydrological cycle and changes in atmospheric composition. Furthermore, regional syntheses of speleothem data provide an opportunity to reconstruct changes in atmospheric circulation patterns. Such syntheses open up the possibility of using speleothem records to evaluate state-of-the-art climate models that explicitly simulate water and carbon isotopes and/or atmospheric tracers such as dust. Several of the modelling groups involved in palaeoclimate simulations during the current phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6/PMIP4) are using with isotope- and tracer-enabled model versions, and, thus, it is timely to assess the state of data availability and our understanding of these records.

The SISAL Working Group of the Past Global Changes project (PAGES; http://pastglobalchanges.org/ini/wg/sisal/intro) invites contributions from the community documenting speleothem records and their interpretation for key regions of the world, particularly contributions drawing on the SISAL database.  We also invite methodological contributions, including innovative approaches to dating, interpretation, climate reconstruction, and data-model comparison.

Prof. Sandy P. Harrison
Dr. Laia Comas Bru
Guest Editors