jaishrigeology@gmail.com

Jaishri Sanwal Bhatt

Geologist | Paleoclimate & Active Tectonics| Science Communicator | JNCASR Bangalore, India

Bangalore

, Karnataka

. India

Contributor Since April 2026

I am a geologist and paleoclimatologist with over two decades of research experience in reconstructing long-term climate change and active tectonics using cave archives and geological proxies. My work spans the Indian and Nepal Himalaya, the Andaman Islands, and the Eastern and Western seaboards of India, addressing questions that sit at the intersection of Earth science, water security, and natural hazard assessment. My primary research tools are paleolakes and speleothems – the secondary carbonate formations that grow inside caves over thousands of years, silently recording rainfall patterns, temperature shifts, monsoon fluctuations, earthquake events, and even tsunamis. I have spent over twenty years collecting, dating, and deciphering the geological archives from lakes to caves across the central and western Himalaya, building some of the most detailed Holocene climate records available from the Indian subcontinent. This work has been supported by multiple national fellowships from the Department of Science and Technology and the Board of Research in Nuclear Sciences, Government of India. I am the author of 40+ peer-reviewed and contributed publications and a co-author of an Elsevier Book, Neotectonism in Indian Subcontinent: Landscape Evolution (2017), with the Late Prof. K.S. Valdiya. My fieldwork has taken me across four continents, from the Austrian Alps and the Carpathians to Laos, Oman, and the Rockies, and I bring that breadth of geological perspective to every problem I study.

Beyond the laboratory and the field, I am deeply committed to science communication and outreach, because I believe that science belongs to everyone. I have delivered lectures and hands-on training programs for students across rural India, from the remote villages to urban colleges, translating the language of rocks, caves, and climate into stories that resonate with young minds. I actively mentor graduate and postgraduate students, with a particular focus on empowering women in STEM. I have also engaged with the public through media interviews and social platforms, making the science of caves, their role in climate records, earthquake history, and freshwater resources, accessible to a much wider audience. I believe that a scientist’s responsibility does not end at the publishing scientific papers. It extends to the student in the rural schools who deserves to understand why the spring near their home is drying up, why the mountain shakes, and why the rock beneath their feet holds the memory of ancient oceans. Through my outreach work, I am popularising geological sciences as a way of reconnecting people with the natural world around them, because geology is not an abstract discipline confined to laboratories. It is the story of the ground we walk on, the water we drink, the air we breathe, and the landscapes that shape our cultures and livelihoods. I share with students and communities how rocks are not just stones but living archives of Earth’s history, how a single cave formation can tell us about droughts that toppled civilisations, and how understanding the planet’s past is our most powerful tool for protecting its future. My goal is simple: to help people see science in every small thing around them, in a pebble by the river, in the colour of a hillside, in the taste of spring water and in doing so, to build a deeper, more instinctive love for the Earth we all share.

InterSpheres of Interest

July 16, 2026

Written in Rocks: A Geologist’s Journey into Deep Time

Earth’s Memory, Part One Abstract Every rock carries a fragment of Earth’s memory. Collectively, these fragments preserve an extraordinary geological record spanning more than 4.5 billion years of planetary evolution. This article traces that record through the deep-time history of our planet—from the formation of Earth’s earliest crust and the Great Oxidation Event, when microbial life transformed the planet’s atmosphere, to the five great mass extinctions that repeatedly reset the trajectory of life, and the Snowball Earth episodes, when our planet experienced its most extreme glaciation. Drawing on more than two decades of fieldwork across Himalaya and Peninsular India, among ancient rocks, minerals, and fossils that bear direct witness to these planetary transformations, it explores how geologists reconstruct Earth’s early history from evidence preserved in the geological archives. Taken together, these geological events reveal a recurring pattern: Earth is a dynamic system in which every major crisis has also created the conditions for new and often more complex forms of life to evolve. That pattern, written into rocks billions of years old, continues to shape the planet today. I first learned to listen to rocks long before I had the words to describe what that meant. It began in the Himalaya, the youngest mountain range on Earth, still rising, still deforming, and still recording the ongoing collision between continents. During my early fieldwork, I spent long days mapping folded strata, tracing fault scarps, and trying to understand how landscapes preserve evidence of processes operating across vastly different geological timescales. At that time, I often felt that the mountains were trying to say something in a language I had not yet learned. Over time, through fieldwork, mapping, and countless hours spent among rocks and sediments, I began to decipher that silent language. The lesson deepened across many other landscapes of India....