Members of the research group have recently published a paper on the geochemistry of karst water in Romania. The paper is the result of field investigations triggered by observations made in caves in Croatia during the June 2023 fieldtrip. While visiting Samograd and Barać caves, the Romanian counterparts were introduced to monitoring techniques and methodologies dealing with cave climate, CO2 dynamics and karst hydrology. These were later used in several caves that were monitored in Romania, caves in which the combined expertise of Croatian and Romanian scientist were used. The results were further discussed during the February fieldtrip and workshop in Romania and the results were published in a paper that showed that infiltration of winter snow melt is the main source of water feeding several karst springs in NW Romania. These findings are now used to discuss connectivity between surface and cave environments through the epikarst and its role in determining CO2 dynamics in caves.
This work has been supported in part by Croatian Science Foundation under the project Dynamics and
distribution of CO2 in karst vadose and epiphreatic zone (CARDIKARST) IPS -2022-02-2260.
The article is available at this link.
