Adamkó Péter - Dénes György - Leél-Őssy Szabolcs: The Caves of Buda - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1992)

continuously uplifting since the Ice Age (and probably also in the last 1-2 million years), the karst water table has been falling. As a result, the mixing zone of the ascending thermal waters and descending rainwaters also dropped. The favourable conditions for dissolution and mixing corrosion shifted through the subsequent layers of rocks. The rate of uplift varied significantly both in place and time. Areas with slower uplift allowed dissolution to a greater extent leading to the formation of distinct levels in a cave system. The caves of Buda are multi-level cave systems with a vertical dimension of about 100 metres.

In the Szemlő-hegyi Cave, the Meteor Corridor and the Yellow Chamber are nearly 30 meters above the Giant Corridor which is open to the visitors. Similarly, in the Pál-völgyi Cave visitors have to take more than one hundred stairs to climb from one cave level to another.

The formation of these caves probably took place in several stages. Hundreds of thousand years may have passed between the successive stages. It is not possible to determine the exact age of these large and complex cave systems. Nevertheless, scientists agree that these are probably only a few hundred thousand year old and should not be older than 1-2 million years at most.

Crystals decorating the cave walls (calcite, aragonite, barite, and gypsum) no longer precipitate there from the hot water. The caves are in a declining phase from a geological point of view since the area was uplifted. The dripstones and some of the gypsum coatings, however, are still growing formations.

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