Cave drips in Peru just rewrote 450,000 years of monsoon history

Textbooks say the Asian and South American monsoons work like a seesaw: when one strengthens, the other weakens. A team reading stalagmites — cave formations that record rainfall layer by layer — from Peru has reconstructed 450,000 years of rain and found 10 long episodes when both monsoons strengthened or weakened together, breaking the seesaw pattern for thousands of years at a time. The study, published in Nature, does not predict future rainfall; it gives climate scientists a hard benchmark — nearly half a million years of it — against which to test the models that do.

SDG 13 · Climate action