Very interesting! I'll have to give it a read once I get a break from all the S4 fun 😁 but at first glance I see some similarities between their observed trends and Dasht's 2021 paper about Mongolian warming... worth looking into further!

It's in my S4 poster... you'll see on Monday 😉

Would definitely be an interesting case study! See if we can identify the English Civil War in a stalagmite?? Yet another wonderful application for speleothem-based reconstructions 🤣

In my defense, this is a 5mm slab meant for analysis in another city, so it's very fragile. And I may be a bit stressed.

Unfortunately the sample was found broken (it's from Mongolia, so ice-shattering is common). However, here's a best guess! (Plus, pic of the outside-- its not uncommon to see rippled speleothems in caves, but I never wondered how they'd look in cross-section).

And this is why models suggest up to 99% of Mongolian permafrost loss by the end of the century 😢

Wonder whether such heatwaves happened in previous interglacials... with such a tight relationship btwn aridity and land temp in these climates, I'm sure our caves could offer some clues.