Cave Reveals Southwest's Abrupt Climate Swings During Ice Age

Sarah Truebe, a geosciences doctoral student at the University
of Arizona, checks on an experiment that measures how fast
cave formations grow in Arizona's Cave of the Bells.

Ice Age climate records from an Arizona stalagmite link the Southwest's winter precipitation to temperatures in the North Atlantic, according to new research.

The finding is the first to document that the abrupt changes in Ice Age climate known from Greenland also occurred in the southwestern U.S., said co-author Julia E. Cole of the University of Arizona in Tucson.

"It's a new picture of the climate in the Southwest during the last Ice Age," said Cole, a UA professor of geosciences. "When it was cold in Greenland, it was wet here, and when it was warm in Greenland, it was dry here."

The researchers tapped into the natural climate archives recorded in a stalagmite from a limestone cave in southern Arizona. Stalagmites grow up from cave floors.

The stalagmite yielded an almost continuous, century-by-century climate record spanning 55,000 to 11,000 years ago. During that time ice sheets covered much of North America, and the Southwest was cooler and wetter than it is now.

Cole and her colleagues found the Southwest flip-flopped between wet and dry periods during the period studied.

50K-yr-old cave

Archaeologists have discovered a 50,000-year-old volcanic cave in Syria, which is the largest of its kind in the country.

According to a report by the Global Arab Network, the volcanic cave was found by the in Sweida city, Southern Syria, by the Syrian Society for Exploration and Documentation, who named it Soua’ada Cave.

Secretary of the Society Khaled Nuwailati said that the exploration and documentation committees organized a walk in December 18, 2009, after receiving information on undiscovered caves in that area.

Soua’ada cave was found after removing a large boulder blocking its entrance, revealing volcanic geological formations that are over 50,000 years old.

There are numerous spaces that become larger deeper into the cave, with air currents showing that the cave has another opening.

It is estimated that the cave is over 3 kilometers deep, which makes it the largest cave in Syria.

According to Wasim al-Shaarani, head of Sweida Department of Archeology, the cave was formed by the flow of volcanic lava that cooled down and formed a long rectangular hollow area that expands the further one goes into the depths of the cave, which isn’t fully explored yet.

The volcanic caves of Sweida date back to the Paleolithic age which began around 40,000 BC and ended around the end of the third millennium BC.

Some of the oldest volcanic rocks found in the governorate date back to the Miocene and Pliocene ages.

Source: Zeenews