This paper is of great interest to the geoscience community and the broader public because it offers a comprehensive European flood event catalogue that merges historical records with modelled data, providing an extensive overview of coastal, riverine and compound flood impacts across Europe over seventy years. This will help enhance the accuracy and completeness of flood impact assessments, crucial for improving flood risk management and mitigation strategies. It also provides a milestone dataset for understanding changes in hazard, vulnerability and exposure for national, regional and continental flood risk assessments.

The subject of the paper is well outside the mainstream, and interesting for its methodological approach, the way it connects cave hydrology to air permeability of sedimentary rock, and the relevance for the protection (or lack thereof) of prehistoric cave art.