Four fossil assemblages helped to review the local weather throughout 65, 57, 54, and 25 mya
About 180 million years ago, India separated from the traditional supercontinent Gondwana and took a protracted northward journey of about 9,000 km to affix Eurasia. During this journey, the subcontinent moved from the southern hemisphere, crossed the Equator to achieve its present place within the northern hemisphere. Due to those altering latitudes, it skilled totally different weather conditions, and a brand new research has now tried to map these climatic variations utilizing leaf fossils.
“The evolution of the monsoonal climate in India is still debatable and not fully understood. Though recent data indicates that the monsoon system we experience now dates back to about 25 million years, it is still unclear how the climate was during its long voyage,” says Gaurav Srivastava from Birbal Sahni Institute of Palaeosciences, (*25*), corresponding creator of the paper not too long ago revealed in Gondwana Research.
The staff analysed the morphological characters of fossil leaves collected from Deccan Volcanic Province, East Garo Hills of Meghalaya, Gurha mine in Rajasthan and Makum Coalfield in Assam. The 4 fossil assemblages had been discovered to be from 4 totally different geological ages and helped to review the local weather throughout 65, 57, 54, and 25 million years ago respectively. “It has been observed from across the globe that plant leaf morphological characters such as apex, base and shape are ecologically tuned with the prevailing climatic conditions to adapt for all the seasons throughout the year. We applied this model to characterise the past monsoon from fossil leaves,” explains Dr. Srivastava.
Fossil truths
The outcomes indicated that the fossil leaves from India had been tailored to an Australian sort of monsoon and never the present Indian monsoon system throughout its voyage. The reconstructed temperature information present that the local weather was heat (tropical to subtropical) in any respect the studied fossil websites with temperatures various from 16.3–21.3 levels C. All the fossil websites skilled excessive rainfall, which diverse from 191.6 cm to 232 cm.
Dr. Srivastava explains that since India was the one subcontinent to have crossed from the southern hemisphere to the northern hemisphere, it’s a laboratory to review biogeo modifications and perceive how the natural world modified accordingly.
“Our future plan is to better understand the evolutionary history of Indian monsoon and its role in the evolution of biodiversity hot spots in South and Southeast Asia. This will help in the conservation of modern biodiversity hot spots. Understanding the past dynamics of Indian monsoon will also help in climate modelling for future monsoon prediction,” he provides.
