Ice Caves

Aurel Persoiu is senior research fellow at the Emil Racoviță Institute of Speleology, Cluj Napoca, Romania. He has 17 years of experience working in ice-cave-related topics, acquired while working toward his MSc (2002) and PhD (2011), as well as during his professional career at Emil Racoviţă Institute of Speleology, University of South Florida, and University of Suceava. During this time, he has co-authored one book and several book chapters, written 13 articles in peer-reviewed journals and delivered more than 100 conference talks at meetings throughout the world on various topics related to ice caves. He organized the First International Workshop on Ice Caves (Cluj Napoca, Romania, 2004) as well as co-organizing several succeeding ones (2011, 2012, 2014). In 2007, he initiated the Working Group on Ice Caves within the International Speleological Union (UIS) and served as its first president between 2007 and 2009, and is currently the vice-president of the Glacier, Firn, and Ice Caves Commission of the same organization. Stein-Erik Lauritzen is professor of speleology and quaternary geology and head of the Uranium-Series dating laboratory at the University of Bergen. His research interests span over glacier ice-contact speleogenesis, chemical kinetics, quaternary geochronology as applied to caves and landscape evolution, and the extraction of environmental information from speleothems and other cave deposits. He has worked with cave fauna and aDNA on the ancient brown bear population in Norway, and on dating early Homo sapiens artefacts in South Africa. He is an active caver, and thus enjoys cave exploration and mapping. He is a member of Centre for Early Sapiens Behaviour (SapienCE), and Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research at Bergen University, and is an honorary life member of the National Speleological Society in the U.S. He was featured in a documentary on climatic research from caves and in a National Geographic documentary concerning the formation of giant gypsum crystals at the Naica Mines, Mexico. He is the initiator of the symposia series “Climate Change: The Karst record” of which the first was arranged in Bergen in 1996.

"The coverage provided within Ice Caves is encyclopaedic. My comments relate only to the few areas with which I have a little familiarity. There is a wealth of useful knowledge in the introductory overview, which is applicable to all countries. An excellent book. Expensive, but money well spent."--Cave and Karst Science

• PART I PERENNIAL ICE ACCUMULATIONS IN CAVES: OVERVIEW1. Introduction2. History of Ice Caves Research3. Ice Caves Climate4. Ice Genesis, Morphology and Dynamics5. Dating Cave Ice Deposits6. Cryogenic Mineral Formation in Caves7. Ice Cave Fauna8. Microbial Life in Ice Caves9. Paleoclimatic Significance of Cave Ice10. The Management of Ice Show CavesPART II ICE CAVES OF THE WORLD11. Geography of Cave Glaciation12. Ice Caves in Switzerland13. Ice Caves in Austria14. Ice Caves in Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina15. Ice Caves in Canada16. Ice Caves in Croatia17. Ice Caves in Germany18. Ice Caves in Greece19. Ice Caves in Italy20. Ice Caves in Iran21. Ice Caves in Asia22. Ice Caves in FYR of Macedonia23. Ice Caves in Norway, Fennoscandia and the Arctic24. Ice Caves in Poland25. Ice Caves in Romania26. Ice Caves in Russia27. Ice Caves in Serbia28. Ice Caves in Spain29. Ice Caves in Slovakia30. Ice Caves in Slovenia31. Ice Caves in the USA