The antiquity of Nullarbor speleothems and implications for karst palaeoclimate archives.

ABSTRACT: Speleothems represent important archives of terrestrial climate variation that host a variety of proxy signals and are also highly amenable to radiometric age determination. Although speleothems have been forming on Earth for at least 400 million years, most studies rely upon the U-Th chronometer which extends only to the mid Pleistocene, leaving important questions over their longer-term preservation potential. To date, older records, exploiting the advantages of the U-Pb chronometer, remain fragmentary 'snapshots in time'. Here we demonstrate the viability of speleothems as deep time climate archives by showing that a vast system of shallow caves beneath the arid Nullarbor plain of southern Australia, the world's largest exposed karst terrain, formed largely within the Pliocene epoch, wi

SUBMITTER: Woodhead JD 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6345804 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature