All posts


Note: I am not a dendroclimatologist. I was just trying to be cool.


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Climate Change (go here →)


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Geology


On Darwin's Lost World: Part I | Part II

Stratigraphy: The Geological Time Scale - an introduction | The new 'Meghalayan Age' of Earth's History | The new Holocene Ages

The Rise of Humans: Where did we come from? Part I | Part II | Part III

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Academia and Science


Research in India: 10 things research should NOT be about | Classic Indian Reactions to "Research" | Why Are We Indians Ruining Science | Science in India - Doomed to Obscurity ? | Predatory journals: academic toxins

Pseudo-Science: Dwarka: The Lost City

Predatory journals: Why are we Indians ruining Science? | Predatory journals: academic toxins | On predatory journals, and the need for academic honesty in public conversations

Requests to academics: On predatory journals, and the need for academic honesty in public conversations | Public discussions in the time of crises

Suggestions for students: On summer internship applications | Why not to not choose Earth Sciences | Why choose Earth Sciences


Clicked in New York, 2017

Personal


A Visit to Illinois: America, One Month Old | O Chicago, where do I begin? :) | O Chicago, you deserve another try | O Chicago, that was a tough goodbye

A Lifetime in Goa pictures

Menstrual Hygiene: Let's Solve This Bloody Problem

Liberal values: America, One Month Old

Book review: The Lost World

Birthday thoughts

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On Darwin's Lost World - Part II

<< Previous page So what do we (did Darwin) know by now (then) ? That living creatures from the very very ancient past (we're talking in terms of millions of years) were often found preserved in the rock record. That we could make out some things about the past environments from these fossils. Fossils showed specific associations: you saw only certain types and groups of fossils in certain suites of rocks (belonging to different periods of geological time). There came a dead end at the base of the Cambrian. Scientists like to call this the Cambrian Explosion today, but back then, many of them were more inclined to dismiss this either as a figment of the imagination of relatively smaller body of researchers, or simply, incomplete/inaccurate science. That the Creator had made us all, was the popular view. 3 theories emerged to explain why we see the Cambrian Explosion (if it even is a real thing!): Charles Lyell Interestingly, it is said that Lyell was...
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On Darwin's Lost World

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Martin Brasier was a prolific paleontologist. And from what little I know of him, he must have been a pretty cool guy. I recently read his book "Darwin's Lost World" and it was definitely one of the better decisions of my life. On Darwin Thankfully, even the most plebeian of science curricula finds it worthwhile to describe Charles Darwin's scientific accomplishments. To me, all through childhood, Darwin represented my superiority to the apes. When someone said Darwin, I would get a mental picture of an ape gradually turning human. That's an overly simplistic picture, but then again, there is so much to learn about everything  that one doesn't quite know where to start. Source The rock record is the only thing that can give us a picture of the ancient Earth. Most other branches of science can tell you what the Earth is like, and why it is the way it is. But it was Geology that first told us what the Earth was  like, and bits of why it w...
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What is ENSO? Page 2 - SSTs and trade winds

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  This is Page 2 of the sub-series "What is ENSO?". If you haven't already, please read Page 1 first. For convenience, keep that page open in a different tab. = = = What is ENSO? In the previous post , we learnt to identify ENSO phases from the perspective of sea surface temperature anomalies . In this post, I'm going to answer a question that no one really asked ―  What if I wanted to identify ENSO phases from the perspective of sea surface temperatures (SSTs) instead? What if, for no good reason but because I felt like it, I wanted to do away with the "anomalies" bit? Looking at SSTs instead of SST anomalies makes matters unnecessarily complicated, but we're going to do it anyway because it also teaches us a lot. In the image below, I've plotted SSTs from the HadISST dataset. These are mean SSTs for the months of December, January and February (DJF) over all years from 1872-2009. Why did we select the months of DJF? Because ENSO events can be seen...
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