India experienced wetter monsoon 10,000 years ago

PUNE: Citizens fretting over deficient rains can hark back to a time when India experienced deluge. US-based paleoclimatolo gists have found evidence of a much wetter and better monsoon in India almost 10,000 years ago, that is, around the end of the last ice age.
By reconstructing rainfall patterns and comparing them with past records of lakes, caves, marine salinity , discharge, organic matter and decomposed deposits, researchers from University of Colorado, Boulder, and Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, Boulder, have found that most of Rajasthan and northern India probably received 40% more rainfall -with some areas receiving up to 60% more rainfall -10,000 years ago than today .
In fact, Rajasthan, which is now a desert, may have received 60% more rainfall then than now, the study revealed.The average annual rainfall of 4065% more than now was necessary to sustain Lake Sambhar in Rajasthan. Meanwhile, regions of the Ganga and Godavari river basins received about 15% more rainfall at that time, the study found.
The study found that the rain shadow region east of the Western Ghats and North East India received around 5% to 10% less rainfall then as compared to present.
Lead researcher Emily C Gill from the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), University of Colorado at Boulder, told TOI that the study -which was recently published in the international journal Paleoceanography-uses the irregularly scattered pro xy records to provide quantitative reconstructions of spatially gridded rainfall for the past 10,000 years.
“Northwest India is particularly interesting because it is peppered with lake beds that are currently either mostly or completely dry but date back as being wet or `full' 6,000 years ago or earlier. Considering that northwest India is currently desert with very little annual rainfall (about 200-400 mm per year), the existence of these lake beds has intrigued and puzzled researchers since at least the 1970s. We found that a cooler Pacific from 10,000 to 6,000 years ago would have delivered about 40-60% more rainfall here. This could help explain the existence of those lake beds,“ said Gill.
Climate “proxies“ are sources of climate information from natural stores such as tree rings, ice cores, corals, lake and ocean sediments, among others.