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Download the app today. Hi everybody from Wundere. Welcome to another episode of Tides of History. I'm Patrick Wyman. Thanks

so much for being here with me today.

For reasons that aren't especially difficult to figure out, climate and how it changes over time are major topics of conversation right now. We're living in an age when questions of climatic instability and

humanity's role in that instability are at the forefront of our discourse.

Given the salience of those issues, scholars have increasingly turned to the study of

past climates and past eras of climatic

instability to understand how people have dealt with those episodes.

For all the uniqueness of the present situation, we are not the first humans to have faced these problems. But how do we actually study

past climates? What tools are at our disposal? And how should we understand the relationship

between people and climatic conditions, either stable ones or those that are in flux.

To help us answer those questions or at least understand what goes into answering them,

we have a fantastic guest with us here today. Dr. Alan Ageisha holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge in

Geological and Earth Sciences and now works for the US Geological Survey in Alaska, where she

researches and maps Arctic permafrost. She's an expert on

paleoclimate studies and has worked extensively on the ancient climate of South Asia,

particularly with regard to the Indus Valley civilization and its eventual disintegration.

Dr. Giesha, thank you so much for joining me.

Hi Patrick, thanks so much for having me. It's really a pleasure to be with you.

So what got you interested in paleo climate studies? What drew you to the topic?

Yeah, well it's definitely not something I knew about when I was a kid. It's a very niche field. So it wasn't a direct path and at various

points in time I thought I would do something completely different as my profession.

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