Cave Carries Climate Change Clues

Climate change may be happening above ground, but spires of rock deep inside caves carry track records of clues about what our planet's climate used to be like.

Researchers trudged deep inside Borneo caves to analyze stalagmites, or pillars of rock that can form on the ground in wet caves. Using vertical cross-sections of the stony formations, the researchers produced a high-resolution and continuous record of the climate in the Borneo rainforest region over the past 25,000 years.

"These stalagmites are, in essence, tropical ice cores forming over thousands of years," said Jud Partin, a paleoclimatology graduate student at Georgia Tech. "Each layer of the rock contains important chemical traces that help us determine what was going on in the climate thousands of years ago."

Partin and his colleague's results suggest that the tropical Pacific began drying about 20,000 years ago and that this trend may have pre-conditioned the North Atlantic for an abrupt climate change event that occurred about 16,500 years ago, known as the Heinrich 1 event.

"In addition, the Borneo records indicate that the tropical Pacific began to get wetter before the North Atlantic recovered from the Heinrich 1 event 14,000 years ago. Perhaps the tropical Pacific is again driving that trend," said Partin.

As more cave studies produce ancient climate data, Partin thinks a better understanding of the Earth's complex atmosphere will follow. Partin and his colleague detailed their findings in a recent issue of the journal Nature.

—LiveScience Staff

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