Sunday, June 03, 2018

More word salad

Having accused someone else of writing a word salad it's only fair that I should tar jules with the same brush too :-) Life as an unemployed self-employed scientist isn't all holidays and bison burgers, she occasionally does some work too though coincidentally (or not) her latest paper is the result of another trip to the USA a couple of years ago. Unfortunately someone didn't get the open access memo hence my link is to the sci-hub copy. Writs to /dev/null please.

It's a review and thus should be accessible to a wide audience, but monsoon dynamics is a fair way outside my comfort zone so I don't really have much to say about it. The abstract appears to have a rather low Flesch Reading Ease score of 6.8: for comparison my first paragraph above rates 51 (the scores are out of 100, with higher numbers more readable) so I think I've got a good excuse. I think the main conclusion is that more research is needed, and that if someone could come up with a better all-encompassing theory that explained it all, that would be really great. From the paleo perspective (which is where jules comes in) there is the well-known Problem of the Green Sahara, being that there was significant (vegetation-supporting) precipitation in this region during the mid-Holocene, which models cannot adequately explain or represent.

Here's a diagram about monsoon dynamics:



Well, that's about it from me. Still on holiday but we've got some work lined up and will be be returning to it in the near future.

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