Category:Speleothem Working Group

Overview

In the Linked Earth context, a working group (WG) is a self-organized coalition of knowledgeable experts, whose activities are governed herewith. This page is dedicated to the discussion of data and metadata standards for speleothems, and aims to formulate a set of recommendations for such a standard.

Membership

Specific tasks

We recommend that discussions focus on the following techniques, and explore potential commonalities.

For each observation ype, we recommend:

• structuring discussions around what scientific questions one would want to ask of the data
• listing essential, recommended, and optional information for:
  • the measurements themselves
  • any inference made from the measurements (e.g. calibration to temperature)
  • the underlying uncertainties, and what those numbers correspond to (e.g. 1-sigma or 2-sigma?)
• provide an ideal data table (or link to one) for each type of observation, so the community knows what to report and how to report it.
• provide separate recommendations for new and legacy datasets

Things to describe

Observations

• stable isotopes
• trace metals

Hydrology

The interpretation of geochemical or lithological signals embedded in speleothem archives relies sometimes heavily on implicit assumptions about cave hydrology. What parameters need to be archived to enable long-term re-use and better information extraction from speleothem datasets? A few come to mind:

• karst residence time
• transit time distributions
• porosity
• soil thickness

Chronology

Please see the chronologies WG for generalities about U/Th dating or layer-counting. If challenges specific to dating speleothems exist, please list relevant metadata properties below.

References