South Australia's Naracoorte Caves is one of the world's best fossil sites, containing a record spanning more than half a million years.
involved examining the beautiful calcite formations inside the caves. Collectively, these are called 'speleothems' and they include stalagmites, stalactites and flowstones.Over time, uranium slowly decays into the element lead. This occurs at a known, constant rate – which means we can use uranium in speleothems as a natural clock to date them.
Because speleothems only start to grow once a subterranean cavity is formed and above the groundwater table, the oldest speleothem age reveals the minimum age of the cave itself.From this, we found the caves began to form at least 1.34 million years ago – making them 250,000 to 500,000 years older than previous estimates.
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