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1,000-year-old stalagmites from a cave in India show the monsoon isn’t so reliable – their rings reveal a history of long, deadly droughts

  • Written by Gayatri Kathayat, Associate Professor of Global Environmental Change, Xi'an Jiaotong University
imageStalagmites grow from the cave floor up as water drips down.Gayatri Kathayat

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...

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