engleski

North Dalmatian caves in palaeoenvironmental studies (Croatia)

North Dalmatia (Croatia), as a part of Dinaric classical karst, hosts a variety of caves within different climate zones and diverse environments, from the submarine to the highest mountain peaks. In order to reconstruct Quaternary changes, speleothem-based studies have been conducted in 7 of them – three submarine (Cave in Tihovac Bay on Pag Island, Pit near Iški Mrtovnjak Islet and Vrulja Zečica near Rovanjska) and four subaerial caves (Manita peć, Strašna peć, Modrič and Spilja u Zubu Buljme caves). While the submerged speleothems were used for the reconstruction of the sea-level changes, thorough monitoring, sampling and isotope analyses in subaerial caves provided insight in the regional response to the global climate changes from the Late Pleistocene to Holocene, and present- day precipitation conditions. Caves showed different potential for the palaeoclimate researches: Spilja u Zubu Buljme Cave was evaluated as unreliable for palaeoclimate studies, Strašna peć Cave potentially points to a Holocene paleoseismic event, Manita peć Cave provided stalagmites with climate signals from MIS 5 to MIS 1, whilst Modrič Cave's speleothems cover different periods, with previous studies mostly focused on the last two millennia. Ongoing researches are aimed to the comparison of the speleothem records from littoral and continental part of Croatia with the intention of the resolving spatial and temporal shifting of Mediterranean and Atlantic air masses dominance throughout the late Quaternary in this region.

Caves; speleothems; palaeoenvironmental changes; North Dalmatia; Croatia

Projekt 60200 Sveučilišta u Zadru: Rekonstrukcija regionalnih paleoklimatskih promjena – zapisi iz siga sjeverne Dalmacije. Voditeljica: Maša Surić