Caves often serve as traps for sequences of clastic and chemogenic sediments. These sediments provide a unique opportunity to study the environmental and climatic conditions that prevailed in the past.

Within this project, we plan to study geochemical processes in soil, drip water and cave air, as well as the geochemical properties of speleothems and clastic cave sediments from the Grgos Caves in Samoborsko gorje. In this way we seek answers to the following questions: How do anthropogenic influences, especially changes in vegetation cover, affect changes in the chemical composition of water and speleothems at this site? What are the mechanisms for fluorescence formation in speleothems from this cave? What was the climate like during the Pleistocene in central Croatia? Can the application of the cutting edge TEX86 method provide information about the temperature in central Croatia during the Pleistocene? And finally, where do the clastic and chemogenic sediments that we find preserved in this protected natural geomorphologic monument come from and what do they tell us about the genesis of the wider area? What is the origin of the broken speleothems at this site and can their age, determined by using the U-Th dating method, provide new information about seismic activity in the past?