In the 1840s, Hitchcock suspected laminated sediment in North America could be seasonal, and in 1884 Warren Upham postulated that light-dark laminated couplets represented a single year's deposition.
varve |
French cavers later renamed the cave and engaged in extensive digging, removing much of the valuable varve deposits which the SCRPLA had hoped to preserve for study by professional soil scientists.
These varves allow a chronology to be established, because of the leaf fragments embedded in them, which have been used to calibrate the Carbon-14 time scale beyond the range of the absolute tree-ring calibration.