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This applies to any cave:

You may find a respondent who can tell us the particular answers for Carlsbad caverns, but assessing a cave's age is by no means easy! All I can say for certainty is that the Limestone is far, far older than the caves it contains.

If you mean by that the age of the rock in which the cave lies, you'd need to refer to a geological map of the region. The stratigraphical column at the side of the plan, or in an accompanying text, will show you theage-range of the limestone from its origins as sea-floor sediment.

To find the age-range of the uplands in which the cave lies - which will give the cave's limit of age - you'll need to find out which period of tectonic activity was responsible for the uplift. This process alone takes millions of years.

If you mean the age of the cave, you'll have to trawl through the published research on the particularcave.Establishing a particular cave's age is an extremely complex affair requiring considerable understanding of the local geology, hydrology and the principles of cave formation,and specialist laboratories toanalyse sediments and calcite deposits.

Even then it can only be an approximate age range, for major, complex, multi-levelcaves take hundreds of thousands of years to develop - and if any of their passages are still carrying a stream, they are still developing!

The above might besummarised in the cave / national-parkmanagement's own publicity. I did try to find out myself but all the internet did was direct me into a string of totally irrelevant advertisements for nothing at all to do with the cave!

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12y ago

What else can I help you with?