The Project

Cave deposits as archives of climate and environmental changes.
A Center of Excellence in speleological research

The study of global climate changes is a topic of great scientific and public interest, promoted through international, European and national research programs. That present-day human activity contributes to global climate changes is generally acknowledged, although the extent of this contribution remains a matter of contention. The need for understanding the mechanisms that control present and future climate changes has triggered a revolution in geosciences because this understanding is based on the study of climate variability in the recent geological past (Holocene, through the Middle Pleistocene).

Abrupt climate changes, are particularly important for the human society since they may occur at short time-scales (decades to centuries) and affect both human society and biota on wide surfaces. However, the teleconnections at continental or hemispheric scales are not fully understood. In this respect, understanding the causes of abrupt climate changes of the past, how these changes reflected over large areas and what effects they had to the biosphere and general landscape is a key to foreseeing future changes and their potential effects.

Caves are one of the best continental environments to preserve climatically-relevant archives. They host a broad range of well-preserved, climatically-relevant, archives such as calcite formations, sediments, fossil remains, and ice. All of these can be accurately dated, and they yield a multitude of proxies that can be used to understand past climate and environmental changes. Coeval deposits can be correlated over large territories allowing for understanding of long-distance teleconnections.

This project aims at using a variety of cave and karst deposits from Romania for the paleoclimatic and paleoenvironmental reconstructions with a focus on abrupt climate changes. Selected cave sites from Romania will be compared with cave sites from Norway, where abrupt cooling episodes in the past are known to cause cessation of deposition in caves due to permafrost formation and ice-sheet expansion. On the contrary, at mid-latitudes of SE Europe, paleoclimate records from caves are likely to be more complete, although they still reflect the abrupt climatic events. The project aims at a comparative study of the N and SE geographic extremes of Europe (sensu lato) allowing for additional intermediate records to be added along this geographic transect.

The project will establish a Center of Excellence (CoE) in speleological research in Romania through the participation of three academic partners: the “Emil Racovita” Institute of Speleology, the LITHOS Research Centre, University of Bucharest, and the “Babes-Bolyai” University in Cluj-Napoca. The “KARSTHIVES” Centre benefits of the long-term collaboration with the University of Bergen. The center aims at gathering highly qualified researchers from fields such as geology, geochronology, palaeontology, geography, biology, physics, etc. and allow for financial and logistical resources to support a significant number of young MS and PhD students as well as young researchers at postdoctoral level.