As per the news reports in September 2020, an Indian-origin scientist, Nishant Malik, Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in the US, has presented an analysis to study ancient climate patterns in North India over time, based on data from North India covering the past 5,700 years. As per the study, there was a major shift in monsoon patterns just before the dawn of this civilisation. That pattern reversed course right before the civilisation declined due to climate change.
There are several theories about the fall of the Indus Valley Civilisation including invasion by nomadic Indo-Aryans and earthquakes. However, climate change appears to be the most likely scenario, but there was no mathematical proof until the new hybrid approach was applied.
As per the researcher, studying ancient climate time series with mathematical tools, typically used to understand climate, is a challenging task. Usually, the data got to analyse paleoclimate is a short time series with noise and uncertainty in it. But the tool, very often used in understanding climate and weather, is dynamical systems, which is harder to apply to paleoclimate data.
This method will help scientists to develop more automated methods of finding transitions in ancient climate data to reach important historical findings.
Courtesy: ndtv.com