Minute amounts of drip water are trapped as fluid inclusions in stalagmites in caves. This water represents samples of palaeoprecipitation, contemporaneous with speleothem growth. Our project aims at measuring the isotopic composition of this palaeowater trapped in the course of the Holocene, i.e. the last 11,700 yrs. The data will be acquired from cave sites located along a 8,500 km-long longitudinal transect, following the direction of the moisture transport from the Atlantic seaboard of the Europe inland to eastern Siberia (Lake Baikal). If successful, this project will be a major step toward using stable water isotopes in this part of the world for quantitative palaeoclimate and palaeohydrological studies. The applicant’s group operates one of the very few analytical lines worldwide capable of measuring the isotopic composition of fluid-inclusion water.
FWF project FP257160
P.i.: Yuri Dublyansky
co-p.i.: Christoph Spötl
Duration: 2014-2018
Partners:
Denis Scholz (University of Mainz)
Frank McDermott (University of Dublin)
Martin Werner (Alfred Wegener Institute, Bremerhaven)
Marc Luetscher (our group)
Matthew Lachniet (University of Nevada Las Vegas)
Olga Kadebskaya (Mining Institute Perm)
Russian Geographic Society
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