High-resolution monitoring of Yok Balum Cave, Belize: An investigation of seasonal ventilation regimes and the atmospheric and drip-flow response to a local earthquake

The nature of cave ventilation is of interest to cavers, speleologists, and paleoclimatologists working with stalagmites. Because cave ventilation systematics may change over the growth span of a stalagmite, understanding what factors affect them is critical for determining events that may have affected climate proxies within the stalagmite. Similarly, understanding how the hydrology of the drips feeding a stalagmite evolves through time is key to building robust records of paleoclimate, particularly because stalagmite records have become critical archives of climate change information of the last 500,000 years. In this article, the authors present data from an extensive, on-going monitoring effort at Yok Balum Cave, Belize, initiated in 2011, that characterizes high-resolution ventilation dynamics at this site. Clear seasonal ventilation regimes exist, driven by thermally induced inside-outside air density differences. The winter regime is dominated by air inflow into the cave, decreased drawdown from the epikarst into the cave, and a limited diurnal signal.