Studies of cave sediments. Physical and chemical records of paleoclimate / Изучение пещерного осадконакопления. Физические и химические свидетельства палеоклиматов

Caves occupy incongruous positions in both our culture and our science. The oldest records of modem human culture are the vivid cave paintings from southern France and northern Spain, which are in some cases more than 30,000 years old (Chauvet, et al, 1996). Yet, to call someone a "caveman" is to declare them primitive and ignorant. Caves, being cryptic and mysterious, occupied important roles in many cultures. For example, Greece, a country with abundant karst, had the oracle at Delphi and Hades the god of death working from caves. People are both drawn to and mortified by caves. Written records of cave exploration exist from as early as 852 BC (Shaw, 1992). In the decade of the 1920’s, which was rich in news events, the second biggest story (as measured by column inches of newsprint) was the entrapment of Floyd Collins in Sand Cave, Kentucky, USA. This was surpassed only by Lindbergh’s flight across the Atlantic (Murray and Brucker, 1979).
Cave science also has a long history, with many accounts appearing as early as the sixteenth century (Shaw, 1992; 2000). The term speleology has become accepted as the defining term for the scientific study of caves (Moore and Sullivan, 1997), yet the discipline has had difficulty integrating with mainstream sciences. This difficulty has two roots. First, the hidden and arduous nature of most caves means that non-specialists rarely visit them. Second, the bulk of data on caves has come from the recreational caving community, which has cast aspersions on the legitimacy of speleology. Caving for recreation has been considered a fringe activity by society. The journalistic terms "spelunking" and "spelunker", used to describe the activity and the individual, respectively, have emphasized the view that cave explorers are odd people (from personal experience, we can say that a few most certainly are). Those who explore for recreation call themselves "cavers". Over 95% of the cave maps in existence were made by these men and women, who produce them without compensation, for the pure pleasure of creation. And, yet, these maps form the basis for almost all scientific studies within caves. Imagine an analogous situation for the earth sciences, if recreational cartographers drew most of the topographic maps in the world at night, after their day jobs were over. <...>