Fossil Oysters Reveal 200,000 Years of Unchanging Rainfall Seasons in Sudan

Fossil Oysters Reveal 200,000 Years of Unchanging Rainfall Seasons in Sudan

Buried in the river sediments of eastern Sudan lies an unlikely climate archive: the fossilized shells of freshwater oysters that lived, fed, and grew along the Atbara River tens of thousands of years before humans built dams or wrote a single word. A research team led by Aisha Huseen of the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin has now drilled into these shells layer by layer and read their isotopic chemistry like the rings of a tree, extracting a re…