An exploration of the utility of speleothem age distributions for palaeoclimate assessment

Abstract

Age distributions of speleothem growth frequency are often employed as proxies for past climate variation. However, their interpretation can be influenced by many variables such as the type of probability density estimator used, the number of samples studied, and indeed the nature of the sampling itself. In order to explore the utility of speleothem age distributions in this context, we constructed a synthetic speleothem growth dataset by randomly generating U-Th ages, based on a known climatic forcing to evaluate whether the most basic climatic information could be recovered by subsequent sampling of this dataset under differing conditions. This modelling approach allows us to separately ex..