Experts from the National Park Service (NPS) have begun excavating the opening of a cave in South Dakota's Black Hills to find out more information on how the climate of the region has changed throughout the course of thousands of years.
The Persistence Cave, located in the Wind Cave National Park, has been closed off since it was first discovered by a park service worker in 2004. The agency said this was in part to prevent amateur spelunkers from disturbing the well-preserved site.
Jim Mead, a professor at the East Tennessee State University, is set to lead a team of scientists in excavating the mouth of the cave and collect samples of animal bones and sediment for analysis.
The researchers have unearthed fossils of at least three species that have never been seen in the region before such as the platygonus, the pine marten and the pika. They have also recovered bones that are believed to be around 11,000 years old.
Mead said the discovery of the pika remains provide an interesting look at the ecology that existed in the area before. The animal, which resembles a rodent, still exists in cold, mountainous regions of North America. This suggests that the Black Hills could have been a very different environment from what it is today.
"What has changed to push it into Wyoming but not be in the Black Hills?" Mead added.
Mead and his team will also analyze fossils recovered from another well-preserved excavation area, the Mammoth Site. The site was discovered during the 1970s and has since provided scientists with high quality fossils of prehistoric animals.
The researchers will compare data from both sites in order to determine how much the region's climate has developed over the years. The death of the mammoths came at around 26,000 years ago, while the oldest set of bones the team recovered from the Persistence Cave only date back to around 11,000 years.
"In reconstructing the past environments of the Black Hills, it's nice to have a number of different points," Mead explained.
"What we're trying to do, centered through the Mammoth site, is to understand essentially the Ice Age environmental change through time."
As of the moment, the NPS will not reveal the exact location of the Persistence Cave to preserve its contents. The most that the agency is willing to disclose is that the opening of the cave is around one-third of a mile from the edge of the tunnel system in Wind Cave.
It is believed that the current research being conducted by Mead and his team accounts to only half of what could be discovered in the Persistence Cave.
Photo: Daveynin | Flickr
