An epochal point by a meghalayan stalagmite

Prime Minister Narendra Modi never tires of reiterating that the 21st century is India’s century, but the official keeper of geological time, the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS), has trumped him by announcing that the last four millennia have already been (at least a part of) India’s era — the Meghalayan Age, the latest part of the Holocene Epoch that began 11,700 years ago with the retreat of glaciers at the end of the last Ice Age.

Geologists have a rather longterm view of time that makes a century far too small a measure to consider; but for politics, even a week is a long time. So, the prime minister’s 100-year timeframe is very farsighted indeed by those standards.

However, the choice of name has nothing to do with India’s clout but with the discovery of a stalagmite growing from the floor of the Mawmluh Cave in Meghalaya that shows in its layers a shift in the isotopes of oxygen atoms, denoting a 20-30% fall in monsoon rain at two points over 4,000 years ago.


It would be germane to note that geological epochs and eras are usually decided on the basis of catastrophic events, with the Meghalayan Age beginning from the 200-year drought that devastated the Indus Valley, Egypt, Mesopotamia and other great cultures 4,200 years ago. So, what disaster will trigger the end of the Meghalayan Age and the beginning of the next?