Chauvet Cave : A Memory of Earth’s History

The exceptional state of preservation of the Chauvet Cave is due to its closure by a rockfall that progressively blocked the entrance over the last 30,000 years. The cave is located on the Cévennes fault, which has been capable of producing significant earthquakes that could, even today, affect our society. To better understand these ancient earthquakes, searching for their traces in the natural records preserved in the cave for 30,000 years represents an important scientific challenge for the future.

This project involves a team from EDYTEM and ISTerre (two laboratories belonging to the OSUG federation), as well as members of the LMC14 and CEREGE laboratories. The multidisciplinary approach focuses on questions related to observing the stability of the cliff in response to temperature changes, characterizing the geochronology of the rockfall blocks, describing the geomorphology, and developing 3D models of the volumes involved in the rock collapses over the past 40,000 years. The age of the cave’s closure and the evolution of the entrance area are also examined through the dating of speleothems that have sealed the rockfall since the Holocene.

This major research project, supported by LABEX OSUG since 2022, follows on from the work carried out by the scientific team studying the Chauvet Cave since its discovery in 1994, particularly on the area around the cave’s entrance.