Completion of a long-lasting collaboration on a Slovenian cave

The 37th International Geological Congress in Busan (Korean Republic) announced the decision of the Executive Committee of the International Union of Geological Sciences (under UNESCO; IUGS) of 21 February 2024. This decision included the Račiška pečina Cave (Matarsko podolje, SW Slovenia) in the IUGS Geoheritage Sites list. Its justification stated: multidisciplinary record of landscape and palaeoenvironmental change within the last 3.4 million years, including geomagnetic field variations in the Pliocene and Pleistocene including the Matuyama/Brunhes transition. The cave features a unique flowstone section with clays containing abundant fauna of small and large vertebrates and gastropods. The long-lasting research, conducted from 2004, employed a combination of geomorphological methods with numerical radiometric dating (U-Th, U-Pb, 14C), correlative stratigraphy based on fossil remains, and stable isotope (O, C) study which contributed to palaeoenvironmental interpretations. This result is credited to an international team of scientists from Slovenia (ZRC SAZU Karst Research Institute, Postojna), Czechia (Institute of Geology of the Czech Academy of Sciences, v. v. i., Department of Zoology of the Faculty of Science of Charles University, Prague, National Museum in Prague) and Poland (Institute of Geological Sciences of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań). For references to some papers resulting from this research click here and here.