Indian Summer Monsoon Variability during the Last Millennium

The seasonal rainfall associated with the Indian summer monsoon during the instrumental period ($\sim$last 150 years) is characterized by a biennial oscillation, such that monsoon precipitation varied between singularly strong and weak years but rarely deviated far from its mean state for consecutive years. This observation has led to a hypothesis that monsoon is a self-regulating system, regulated by the annual cycle of the heat balance in the Indian Ocean, mediated by the cross-equatorial ocean heat transport from the summer hemisphere through wind-driven Ekman transport. Consequently, the present day water resource infrastructure and the contingency planning in the region does not take into account the possibility of protracted failures of the monsoon or drastic shifts in its spatial patterns. Here we present new millennial-length speleothem-based reconstructions of Indian monsoon variability from a number of sites across India that challenges the underlying physics of the aforementioned hypothesis. Our proxy records of Indian monsoon provide clear evidence for type of low frequency and high amplitude variability in rainfall that have not been observed during the short instrumental period.