Environmental Proxies in Karst (EPIK)

The Environmental Proxies In Karst group, led by Dr Chris Day, develops and applies proxies for understanding environmental processes in the top few tens of meters of the Earth’s surface. This small subset of the Earth’s geology is extremely active, key to many major environmental cycles such as the carbon cycle, the water cycle, physical & chemical weathering and is therefore often referred to as the Critical Zone. We focus primarily on karstic regions, where we use secondary calcium carbonate deposits (known as speleothems) to record and reconstruct changes in the environment (e.g. rainfall amount, vegetation properties, weathering intensity) over thousands to millions of years.