Monodromy and log geometry

A now classical construction due to Kato and Nakayama attaches a topological space (the "Betti realization") to a log scheme over $\mathbf{C}$. We show that in the case of a log smooth degeneration over the standard log disc, this construction allows one to recover the topology of the germ of the family from the log special fiber alone. We go on to give combinatorial formulas for the monodromy and the $d^2$ differentials acting on the nearby cycle complex in terms of the log structures. We also provide variants of these results for the Kummer etale topology. In the case of curves, these data are essentially equivalent to those encoded by the dual graph of a semistable degeneration, including the monodromy pairing and the Picard-Lefschetz formula.