"Abrupt Weakening" Of Monsoon Ended Indus Valley Civilization More Than 4,000 Years Ago
LONDON, 27 February – Climate change can seriously damage a civilisation. An “abrupt weakening” of the summer monsoon in north-west India accompanied the decline of the great cities of the Indus valley more than 4,000 years ago, according to new research by British scientists.
They analysed the oxygen isotopes in snail shells preserved in ancient lake sediments to build up a picture of rainfall patterns in prehistory, and found the first direct evidence that sustained drought contributed to the collapse of a great Bronze Age civilisation, they report in the journal Geology.
The Indus or Harappan civilisation – after Harappa, one of the five great ancient settlements of what is now Pakistan and western India – was marked by the world’s first “megacities”, concentrations of population in built-up areas that covered more than 80 hectares.
“They engaged in elaborate crafts, extensive local trade and long-ranging trade with regions as far away as the modern-day Middle East,” said Cameron Petrie of the University of Cambridge. “But by the mid-second millennium BC, all the great urban centres had dramatically reduced in size or been abandoned.”
The finding links the decline of the Indus civilisation to what now seems a much greater scale event: the failure of Early Bronze Age civilisation in Greece and Crete, the weakening of the Old Kingdom in Egypt, and the crumbling of the Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia.
EDIT
http://www.climatenewsnetwork.net/2014/02/climate-change-helped-to-end-monsoon-4000-years-ago/
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