A collaborative project between linguists and atmospheric scientists has successfully deciphered a series of 8th-century Sharada script fragments discovered in a high-altitude Himalayan cache. The texts contain detailed observations on the physics of atmospheric thermal inversion, a meteorological phenomenon where warm air traps cooler air near the surface.
The translated passages describe the systematic monitoring of smoke behavior and cloud formation to predict weather patterns in mountain valleys. These findings represent the earliest known formal scientific inquiry into micro-climatology, revealing that ancient scholars used mathematical models to understand the relationship between altitude, temperature, and air density.