Subterranean Fishes of the World

5743

2013

Coastal Karst Landforms

347-373

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Lace, M.J. and Mylroie, J.E.

Springer

Dordecht

Bermuda, Bahamas, Barbados : : : . many of the places described in this book might appear to be inspired by travel brochures. But here they serve as the prime testing grounds for one of the most vibrant and far-reaching fields in geomorphology: the study of coastal karst and caves. Seacoasts are among Earth’s most dynamic places. While sedimentary deposits are constructed along some of them, erosion and dissolution tend to dominate elsewhere. These opposing processes result in a variety of unique caves, karst, and solutional pores. In water-soluble rocks, coastal caves and karst include a warren of pockets, chambers, channels, and depressions. Water seeping from the surface has decorated many of them with crystalline deposits.Where mechanical erosion dominates, sea caves can be produced in any kind of rock. These features are significant not only for revealing geomorphic processes, but also for interpretation of past climates, sea levels, and geography. For economic geologists they provide important clues to paleoenvironments and the distribution of porosity. Biologists value them as refugia for rare plants and animals. Archeologists and paleontologists recognize their ability to shelter and protect artifacts and organic remains. Some of these coastal features have become well-known tourist sites. Themajority of seacoast caves and karst, as well as the rocks that contain them, are relatively young in geologic terms – typically less than a million years old. Thus they contain records of the intense fluctuations in climate and sea level that took place during that time. It was not until recent decades that coastal caves and karst received substantial attention from the scientific community. They had previously been the domain of scuba divers who entered them mainly for sport, as well as a few geochemists who were intrigued by the interaction of fresh water and seawater. Eventually, in their quest for new frontiers, several karst scientists were drawn from their original domains of continental karst to the attractive islands of the Caribbean and other low-latitude regions. There they found wide-open and welcoming field areas that led in many new directions of exploration and science. Since then, they have expanded their research throughout the world, and they have developed new terminology to encompass their findings. Terms such as eogenetic karst, flank margin cave, and carbonate island karst model are now widespread in the technical literature. We hope that this book stimulates further interest and research in these interrelated fields of the coastal sciences. Much of the work presented in this volume is the result of extensive fieldwork conducted by numerous karst researchers, graduate students and ongoing research projects from various disciplines and organizations. We extend our thanks to the many researchers and cave explorers who have and continue to tirelessly document cave and karst resources in so many parts of the world. Our collective understanding of coastal caves and karst continues to develop as does the appreciation for the integral roles these shoreline and paleoshoreline features play in modeling coastal processes, past, present and future.We extend our thanks to the many colleagues and friends who supported and contributed to the compilation of this work with invaluable insights tempered froma range of perspectives from many fields of research

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