SISAL (Speleothem Isotopes Synthesis and AnaLysis Working Group) database version 1b

Abstract

Note: This edition of the SISAL database was withdrawn on 13 July 2020. It has been superseded by a new edition available at http://dx.doi.org/10.17864/1947.256. Stable isotope records from speleothems provide information on past climate changes, most particularly information that can be used to reconstruct past changes in precipitation and atmospheric circulation. SISAL (Speleothem Isotope Synthesis and Analysis) is an international working group of the Past Global Changes (PAGES) project. The working group aims to provide a comprehensive compilation of speleothem isotope records for climate reconstruction and model evaluation. Version 1b of the SISAL database contains oxygen and carbon isotope measurements from 440 individual and 15 composite speleothem records from 221 cave systems worldwide, as well as metadata describing their cave settings and age-depth models. New records have been added and some metadata has been amended. The SISAL working group has also created SISAL chronologies for 20 entities, all of which had no published chronologies. In order to assure traceability, any presentation, report, or publication that uses the SISALv1b database should cite Atsawawaranunt et al. (2018) (The SISAL database: a global resource to document oxygen and carbon isotope records from speleothems; https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-10-1687-2018) and Comas-Bru et al. (2019) (Evaluating model outputs using integrated global speleothem records of climate change since the last glacial; https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-2019-25). If using individual sites or speleothems, the literature citations for published work provided in the database should also be cited. Contact information of data contributors of unpublished data is also provided and these should be contacted when unpublished records are used on an individual basis