Collaborative Research on Long Paleoenvironmental Records from Cave Sediments

国际社会对全球变化的兴趣日益增加， 开发更长的自然条件记录，以便更好地 将自然控制的变化与诱导的过程进行比较， 加速了人类活动。 越来越多的学者 近年来在地下，检查洞穴中的沉积物，以确定 这些沉积物中的花粉和微体化石是否能提供长期的 环境条件的记录。 该项目将继续 分析了从七个不同的洞穴中收集的材料， 非洲国家。 初步分析估计， 这些材料的历史可以追溯到距今35万年前。 若继续 估计材料的年龄并将其 材料与周围地区的特定类型的植被 洞穴，项目负责人应该能够更全面，更 准确地重建了洞穴遗址的生态条件， 很长一段时间。 这些重建将提供一个基础， 更准确地估计气候和其他自然条件， 这些地区。 这项研究意义重大，因为它将提供相当大的 更多关于不同地区古生态条件的信息 在非洲的几十万年。 这些数据将 补充为其他地区收集的长记录，并使用 其他测量方法，从而提供了更好的基础， 研究自然环境变化的性质和过程 从更新世开始就遍布全球 本研究也 将增加对古生态重建的认识 在这项研究中使用的方法和关于使用洞穴的局限性， 沉积物作为自然环境信息的来源 条件，知识，这将有助于学者研究环境 在历史和当前的时间范围内的变化。

Growing international interest in global change has stimulated development of longer records of natural conditions in order to better compare naturally controlled change with the processes induced or accelerated by human activity. Scholars increasingly have gone underground in recent years, examining sediments in caves to determine whether pollen and microfossils in those deposits can provide long-term records of environmental conditions. This project will continue analysis of materials gathered in ten caves from seven different African nations. Preliminary analyses have estimated the dates of some of these materials to 350,000 years before the present. By continuing the process of estimating the age of materials and associating those materials with specific types of vegetation in regions surrounding the caves, project leaders should be able to more completely and more accurately reconstruct ecological conditions at the cave sites over long time periods. These reconstructions will then provide a basis for more accurate estimation of climate and other natural conditions in those regions. This research is significant because it will provide considerably more information about paleo-ecological conditions in different parts of Africa over hundreds of thousands of years. These data will complement long records gathered for other locales and dated using other methods of measurement, thereby providing an improved basis for examining the nature and processes of natural environmental change throughout the world since the Pleistocene epoch. This research also will increase knowledge about the paleoecological reconstruction methods used in this study and about the limitations in the use of cave sediments as sources of information about natural environmental conditions, knowledge that will help scholars examining environmental change in both historic and current timeframes.