Researchers at the Heritage AI Lab have successfully deciphered a series of 7th-century Grantha script palimpsests recovered from a coastal site in Tamil Nadu. The digital reconstruction revealed fragments of a lost treatise titled Vayu-Dravya-Shastra, which details early Indian theories on atmospheric surface tension and the use of mercury-based instruments to measure air density and humidity fluctuations.
The text describes the construction of 'weather-sensing' vessels that utilized the capillary action of various fluids to predict the onset of the monsoon with remarkable accuracy. This discovery provides the first concrete evidence that ancient Indian scholars applied fluid-dynamic principles to meteorology, developing specialized equipment to monitor the physical properties of the atmosphere centuries before the invention of the barometer in the West.