From caves to climate: Creating the SISAL global speleothem database

Speleothem based paleoclimate records have risen in prominence over the last few years as long-term, precisely dated, continental archives of past changes in the hydrological cycle. but these valuable records have yet to make significant contributions to recent big data syntheses. For example, only seven records are included in the standard Palaeoclimate Modelling Intercomparison Project (PMIP) benchmark dataset (Harrison et al. 2014). A synthesis of existing speleothems records has great potential for exploring regional and global-scale past changes in the hydrological cycle, as well as for evaluating the ability of climate models that explicitly simulate water and carbon isotopes to capture hydroclimate variability through data-model comparisons. To address these issues and to increase the impact of speleothem research in general, PAGES’ SISAL (Speleothem Isotopes Synthesis and Analysis) working group is creating a systematic global synthesis of speleothem δ18O and δ13c records (Fig. 1 and comas bru et al. 2017).