1,000-year-old stalagmites from a cave in India show the monsoon isn’t so reliable – they reveal a history of long, deadly droughts
- Written by Gayatri Kathayat, Associate Professor of Global Environmental Change, Xi'an Jiaotong University
In a remote cave in northeast India, rainwater has slowly dripped from the ceiling in the same spots for over 1,000 years. With each drop, minerals in the water accumulate on the floor below, slowly growing into calcium carbonate towers known as stalagmites.
These...