Study Links IVC’s Decline With Climate Change

In what could be a big development for historians and history enthusiasts, a mathematical study by an Indian-origin scientist claims that shifting monsoon patterns brought about by climate change led to the rise as well as fall of the famous Indus Valley Civilization of South Asia.

The study stresses that there was a change in the monsoon pattern right before the beginning of IVC, and that the climate saw a complete reversal right before its decline.

The research of Nishant Malik, the scientist from Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in the United States, has been published in 'Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science'. The research, which uses mathematical tools, highlights the record of monsoon rainfall in North India in the past 5,700 years.  

A NDTV report quoted Malik as commenting on the intricacies and the challenge involved in such a study.

"Usually the data we get when analysing paleoclimate is a short time series with noise and uncertainty in it. As far as mathematics and climate is concerned, the tool we use very often in understanding climate and weather is dynamical systems. But dynamical systems theory is harder to apply to paleoclimate data," he said.

The study further notes that while several theories explaining the downfall of IVC have been propounded so far, including the Aryan invasion theory and Earthquake theory, the fact that Climate Change led to the decline of one of the world's oldest civilizations is most likely.