Subterranean ecosystems harbor globally rare fauna and important water resources, but ecological processes are poorly understood and are threatened by anthropogenic stresses. Ecosystem analyses were conducted from 1997 to 2000 in Cave Springs Cave, Arkansas, situated in a region of intensive land use, to determine the degree of habitat degradation and viability of endangered fauna. Organic matt...

The UK has a wide variety of hypogenic caves, including transverse maze caves, relict hydrothermal caves, gypsum mazes and hypogenic karst associated with water rising up deep thrust faults. While few of these are particularly extensive, they offer insights into the mechanisms of speleogenesis and mineralisation. The best developed hypogenic caves in the UK are in the Carboniferous limestones o...

Cave collapses emerge during the process of oil reservoir development, seriously affecting oil production. To reveal the collapse and failure mechanism of the carbonate cavern with a buried depth of 5600 m in Tahe Oil Field, using a self-developed ultra-high pressure model test system with the intelligent numerical control function, the model simulation material of carbonate rocks developed to ...

Purpose We investígated the effects of human-induced disruption in a subterranean stable environment containing valuable Palaeolithic paíntings and engravings (Ardales Cave, Southern Spain) using a double analytical approach. Methods An environmental monitoring system was installed in the cave to record temperature, relative humidity, carbon dioxide (C02) and radon e22Rn) concentrations in airo...

The current study deals with the anterior premolar pattern in the cave and brown bear lineage, and its signifi cance in species determination. The occurrence of single premolars and its combinations in skulls and mandibles is recorded for various chronological and regional groups. Both lineages stay more “conservative” in the upper than in the lower dentition, but show contrasting reduction ten...

Red dish mud-rich sed i ments are com mon in sev eral karst ar eas, in the form of red sur face soils and clastic cave in fill ings. The or i gin and sig nif i cance of red sur face soils have been much de bated over re cent years, while clastic mud-rich sed i ments in cave en vi ron ments have re ceived less at ten tion from geoscientists. The ge netic re la tion ship be tween these two ma te ...

Nerja Cave, Southern Spain, was revealed as an important biodiversity reservoir from which several novel species of Aspergillus were described. We carried out aerobiological study in Cave to assess the origin airborne fungi. This quantified fungi present air ten representative halls covering three sectors comprising cave: Touristic Galleries, High and New Galleries. Microclimatological monitori...

Enhanced monsoon duration and soil acidification from acid rain are expected to impact the distribution of microbial communities in surface and subsurface environments, although these impacts are poorly understood for most systems. In central China, soluble carbonate bedrock forms extensive karst landscapes. Current predictions are that the amount of monsoonal precipitation and acid rainfall in...

Bacterial strain LV43 was previously isolated from a floating microbial mat located in Movile Cave, the access point to a chemoautotrophically based groundwater ecosystem in southern Romania. This gram-negative, rod-shaped organism grows autotrophically through the oxidation of thiosulfate and sulfide, but it does not grow heterotrophically. Strain LV43 grows over a pH range of 5.0 to 9.0, with...