THE MONSOON AND THE PLANET
Water is an essential commodity for life on this habitable planet. Rainfall patterns are changing and set to change further in the future, particularly in the tropics where the lives and the livelihoods of more than a third of the world’s population are dependent. By using the chemistry of marine plankton and combining it with climate models, a team of researchers from The Open University have assessed drivers of monsoon rainfall, changes in the tropical rainfall pattern during past warm intervals, and the role of South Asian monsoon rainfall in past global climate.
One of the team, Dr Pallavi Anand, Professor of Ocean Biogeochemistry and Palaeoclimatology, told an audience in the 2024 Orkney International Science Festival how tiny plankton shells capture clues about past ocean conditions - and how these have been used to infer changes in past Earth System processes such as monsoon climate.