This year, the Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH) has hosted the third meeting of the International Summer School on Speleothem Sciences, which brought together in Burgos, from August 20 to 26, more than fifty participants and experts from the five continents.

The most representative figures from the different specialties in Speleothem Sciences participated in a program which included 20 seminars; two poster sessions with a total of 22 presentations; two field visits, one to Atapuerca and another to the karst at Ojo Guareña, as well as several laboratory sessions among which those in the laboratories of Microtomography and Microscopy, Archaeometry and Geochronology should be highlighted.

For a week, there was discussion about processes inside caves, geochemistry, dating techniques and other instrumental analytical techniques, petrography and microstratigraphy of speleothems, age modeling, climate change, and paleoclimatic reconstructions in different places in the world.

Among the participating experts the following should be highlighted: Ian Fairchild, of the University of Birmingham, a founder member of the Royal Geographical Society in the United Kingdom; Hai Cheng, responsible for uranium series dating, of Xi’an Jiaotong University (China); Javier Martín Chivelet, professor of Stratigraphy at the Complutense University of Madrid, and Silvia Frisia, of the University of Newcastle (Australia).

Positive assessment
The Summer School in Burgos, which was organized in collaboration with the IAS (International Association of Sedimentologists) and the Campus of International Excellence CEI-E3, was assessed very positively by all who attended, both for the quality of the content, the effective use of the week and the sound organization of the event, and for the setting in which it was held.