Journal article
Isotopic characterization of cave environments at varying altitudes on the eastern Adriatic coast (Croatia) – Implications for future speleothem-based studies
M Surić, R Lončarić, N Lončar, N Buzjak, P Bajo, RN Drysdale
Journal of Hydrology | ELSEVIER | Published : 2017
Abstract
An important step in the implementation of paleoclimate reconstructions from speleothems (cave carbonate deposits) is to evaluate the sensitivity of the host cave environment to regional climate. Accordingly, we studied three caves at different altitudes (74 m, 570 m and 1250 m a.s.l.) along a transect from the Dalmatian islands to Velebit Mountain peaks in coastal Croatia to characterize their environments in terms of each cave's suitability to host speleothems that would be capable of yielding robust paleoclimate reconstructions. We conducted cave microclimate (2-years) and dripwater (1-year) monitoring and analysed the isotopic composition of precipitation, cave dripwater and modern spele..
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Awarded by University of Zadar
Funding Acknowledgements
We thank National Park Paklenica and Parica family for the logistics, and numerous friends and colleagues for the field assistance. We also thank Ines Krajcar Bronic and Avner Ayalon for internal review and fruitful discussions, and Damir Mlinek from Croatian Meteorological and Hydrological Service for providing meteorological and climate data. RD is grateful to colleagues in the Schools of Geography, Earth Sciences and Engineering at the University of Melbourne for helping to fund the Picarro water isotope analyser. Sebastian Breitenbach and four other anonymous reviewers are gratefully acknowledged for the improving the manuscript. This research was funded by the University of Zadar (Scientific Project 60200 Reconstruction of the regional paleoclimate change - speleothem records from the North Dalmatia (Croatia).