ナショナルジオグラフィックのインスタグラム(natgeo) - 3月3日 23時45分

Photo by @shonephoto (Robbie Shone) and words by @m_synnott (Mark Synnott).As we enter Dark Star, Tonya Votintseva, A Russian molecular biologist, stops to attach a small white disk to the wall. This data-logger is one of several she will install throughout the cave to record temperature, humidity, CO2, and barometric pressure. She will also collect the data-loggers left from the last expedition and ship them to Dr. Sebastian Breitenbach, a paleoclimatologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. After the expedition, Breitenbach explained how he uses the data collected from Dark Star. “The only paleoclimate data we have from this region comes from tree rings, which only go back a couple hundred years. So we have no clue what was happening with the climate in this part of the world 10,000-20,000 years ago. The isotopes tell us whether the water in Dark Star came from the Atlantic or the Indian Ocean, and this can help us to better understand the history of the Indian monsoon. Ultimately, the goal is to understand how global warming will impact the future availability of water in Central Asia.” The drilling of ice cores in Greenland and the Antarctic are iconic examples of paleoclimate proxies, but these ice cores can only be found in polar regions, whereas speleothems represent a terrestrial archive that can be found virtually anywhere, from the tropics to the high latitudes and everywhere in between. Speleothems also have the potential to be orders of magnitude older than what can found in an ice core—the oldest stalagmite is 293 million years old.
For more stories and photos from our feature article Into The Deep, which you can find in the March 2017 issue of National Geographic Magazine, please follow @shonephoto and @m_synnott #darkstar

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