Blackwell Quaternary Geoscience
1 total work
Over the past 10 years, the use of speleothems to study climate change has evolved from a minor curiosity into one of the fastest growing areas of terrestrial climate research. Since 1995, the number of publications using the term has increased ten-fold. Speleothems are one of the very few climate archives that offer both the possibility to investigate climate at, in the best cases, sub-annual resolution and an independent, accurate chronology of climate change. At present, there exists no textbook or other comprehensive summary of the state of speleothem research. Only a few journal-length papers provide a rough overview of the field. I think that an edited, peer-reviewed compilation of papers written by the leading researchers in the field would be a valuable and welcome contribution. As outlined further below, such a collection should cover the theory behind applying speleothems to study climate, discuss the analytical techniques used and provide examples or case studies of the application of speleothems to investigate climate of particular regions or periods.