Cyclicity in speleothems: what climatic signals do they reveal?
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21701/bolgeomin.124.2.010Keywords:
karst, paleoclimate, spectral analisis, stable isotopesAbstract
Interest in studying speleothems as archives of palaeoclimatic information has grown considerably during recent years. Thanks to modern absolute-dating techniques, valuable time series of climate proxies have been generated. One of the most important characteristics of the natural variability of the climate is its cyclic character, the fingerprint of which is to be found in the sequences obtained from the systematic sampling of certain types of speleothem. Nevertheless, the climatic cyclic signals tend to be embedded in the “noise” intrinsically involved in the genesis of the speleothems. To detect these background cyclic climatic signals we have applied spectral analyses to the data compiled by various different authors concerning 22 proxies from speleothems found in caves in 18 countries in five continents. Due to the fact that the the sampling intervals of the sequences measured in the speleothems are uneven we used the Lomb-Scargle periodogram to estimate the different power spectra and the permutation test to estimate the confidence level of the spectral peaks found in the spectra. We conclude that the speleothems record the same kind of cycles that have been obtained from other types of continental and marine deposits. This fact, together with their world-wide distribution, makes the speleothems excellent registers for environmental studies of the geological past in continental settings. It is hoped that the integration of speleothems into palaeoclimatic studies will help to further our understanding of the future evolution of our climate.
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Grant numbers CGL2010-15498
