Geological archives preserve crucial information about past climate changes and help us to extend our “climate memory” and to understand how the climate system reacts to different boundary conditions. Drip stones from caves (so-called speleothems) are a particularly useful climate archive because they grow, protected under ground, over long time periods, contain a multitude of climate proxies, and can be reliably dated by U-Th chronology. In the FluidMICS project, we use the density of former drip water enclosed in microscopic fluid inclusions as a quantitative proxy to determine past cave air temperatures by means of nucleation-assisted microthermometry (NAM).
Photo: Robbie Shone, www.shonephotography.com