Geological Monuments Of India

Well well, this is something I noticed only recently... you will see on the Geological Survey of India website (when it finally uploads) an interactive map showing sites of geological importance.  The GSI has declared these sites National Geological Monuments and has taken on the responsibility of the protection of these sites as well as their promotion for tourism purposes.

Here is the site map of the geological monuments:

Source: Geological Survey of India

And the list:

Fossil Parks:
1) Marine Gondwana Fossil Park (Gondwana basins Eastern India)_2) Fossil Wood Parks ( Tamil Nadu and Jaisalmer Rajasthan) 3) Siwalik Fossil Park  (Himachal Himalaya Foothills) 4) Stromatolite Parks (Proterozoic of Rajasthan)

Rock Monuments:
1) Peninsular Gneiss (near Bengaluru south India) 2) Columnar Basalt (Coconut Island Deccan Basalts near Udupi coastal Karnatak) 3) Pillow Lava (Chitradurga, Karnataka) 4) Pyroclastic Rocks (Kolar, Karnataka) 5) Nepheline Syenite ( (Ajmer district, Rajasthan) 6) Barr Conglomerate (tectonically stretched pebbles, Pali district, Rajasthan) 7) Welded Tuff (Jodhpur district, Rajasthan) 8) Charnockite (near Chennai, Tamil Nadu)

Geological Marvels:
1) Lonar Lake (Maharashtra) 2) Eddy Current Markings ( Panchmahal district, Gujarath) 3) Natural Arch (Chittor district, Andhra Pradesh) 4) Sendra Granite (Pali district, Rajasthan)

Monuments of Stratigraphic Importance:
1) Eparchaean Unconformity, Tirumala Hills Andhra Pradesh representing a time gap of about 800 million years between the Archean and the overlying Proterozoic
2) Jodhpur Group – Malani Igneous Suite Contact, Jodhpur District, Rajasthan- Contact between volcanic rocks and sandstone
3) Great Boundary Fault at Satur, Bundi district, Rajasthan- Faulted contact between the Aravalli terrain and the Vindhyan basin sediments

Monuments of Economic Significance:
1) Laterite in Angadipuram, Malappuram district, Kerala
2)  Bedded Barytes of Mangampeta, Cuddapah district, Andhra Pradesh
3) Gossan, Rajpura – Dariba, Rajsamand District, Rajasthan- Gossan is a weathered zone formed by oxidation of sulphide  ores.

I would add a few more to these-

1) Western Ghat Escarpment, Maharashtra- how can you ignore the spectacular 1000 feet plus basalt escarpments overlooking the coastal plains leading up to the Arabian Sea? choose any site along the sinuous edge of the Deccan plateau. In the USGS Digital Elevation Model to the left the sharp topographic divide between the darker green coastal plain and the pastel plateau shows up clearly.

2) Chambal River Badlands- Sinister looking and rich in bandit lore, these Quaternary landforms along the Chambal  river in Madhya Pradesh offers lessons in Quaternary climate change and river landform evolution.

3) Bhedaghat Marble Cliffs - Near, Jabalpur Madhya Pradesh. I am surprised the GSI missed including this, as it is already well known. These Proterzoic marble cliffs with the Narmada river flowing between is a great spot to visit.

4) Cretaceous fossil beds around Ariyalur , Tamil Nadu- scores of invertebrate palaeontologists have gotten their PhD training here. Ammonoids, echinoids, bivalves, plant leaf imprints, coral reefs... marine life that inhabited the Cretaceous seas. Some sites must be preserved.

5) Main Frontal Thrust- Chosen site along  the Siwalik Front Range- what better way to explain plate tectonics, the geodynamics of the Himalayas and earthquakes than by showing the active fault zone along which the convergence between India and Asia is being accommodated?

I am sure there are many more which geologists working in different  regions of India feel are worthy of protection.  A palaeontologist working with the Agarkar Research Institute in Pune told me that they are petitioning the GSI for protection of many more fossil sites in Gujarat. I hope the GSI extends their list to include recommendations from outside experts.

I also hope they take professional help in advertizing these monuments. Some of the choices seem a bit esoteric to me. I mean... I really can't imagine people flocking to see a "nepheline syenite intruding an antiform". Unless there is a spectacular exposure of folded strata. In which case it should be advertized as such. .. And "Penisular Gneiss"...why not point to the wonderful delicately balanced (that look as if they might topple  over any minute) granite boulders that dot the landscape around many south Indian cities like Bengaluru and Hyderabad? A few could be made into rock parks and protected from the ever consuming urbanization.

Its time also for the GSI to  rachet up its  science outreach programs. Maybe they can invite National  Geographic or Discovery Channel to make  a program on  geological monuments involving experts from Universities and the GSI. And the many regional GSI offices could develop more proactive, well advertized community outreach programs with more use of social media, geology day interaction with scientists and field trips. Educating the public has many dividends. After all, why should opinions on what should be protected be a top down phenomenon? An interested well informed science loving community could put pressure too for the protection of the many geological wonders of India.

J Tuzo Wilson's Hawaiian Dream

Again via Twitter I came across this collection of essays on eminent geologists titled Rock Stars, produced by The Geological Society of America History of Geology Division.

I haven't gone through all of them yet, but there is a lovely piece on J. Tuzo Wilson, the geophysicist most famous for his work on the then incipient field of moving continents and oceanic crust aka plate tectonics.

We know Wilson from geology coursework on the "Wilson Cycle", the opening and closing of ocean basins over hundreds of millions of years. But Derek York who has written the essay has more insights. He remembers that Wilson had a knack of solving problems by visualizing rather than working equations. One of his famous insights into the origin of the Hawaiian island chain came to him this way-

Tuzo’s mind had a fascinating way of solving problems. Unlike most physicists, who find their solutions via mathematics, Tuzo solved problems almost entirely with visual images and then presented the solutions in extremely clear prose. He had a remarkable ability to look into the heart of extreme complexity and see simplicity itself. The nearest mind that I can think of to compare with Tuzo’s was that of Michael Faraday who, instead of integrating differential equations to calculate the electric field, imagined a charged particle to be an octopus with tentacle-like lines of force reaching out into the space around it.

To solve the problem of the origin of the Hawaiian Islands, for example, Tuzo imagined someone lying on his back on the bottom of a shallow stream, blowing bubbles to the surface through a straw. The bursting bubbles were the Hawaiian Islands, and they lay in a line because they were swept along the surface by the moving stream. Thirty years later, leading geophysical theorists use supercomputers to solve horrendous equations that Tuzo”solved” in the visualizing region of his brain.

In today's jargon, the moving  stream is a tectonic plate in motion and the bubbles are rising molten material originating ultimately from a fixed heat source in the mantle. 

Another famous Wilson piece of reasoning was the sense of movement on transform faults linking mid ocean ridges. He predicted that for earthquakes occurring underwater in the middle of the ocean "rocks everybody believed had moved right to left during the earthquake had moved left to right, and vice versa".

What did he mean by that? Well, the sense of motion along transform faults which connect strands of mid-oceanic ridges is opposite to what one would expect from a classical strike slip fault. See the image below.

Fig. A is a bed offset by a sinistral strike slip fault with a left lateral motion.  This means that the piece of crust north of the fault  has moved towards left.

Fig.B shows strands of a mid oceanic ridge. The red line linking the ridges is the transform fault. Notice however that the sense of motion along the transform fault is opposite that of a classical strike slip fault  i.e. the piece of  crust north of the transform fault is moving towards the right as it would  since the ridge is producing new oceanic crust and pushing older crust away.

There are other interesting essays, I enjoyed the one on Lawrence Sloss And The Sequence Stratigraphy Revolution.

Dive in..

Ocean Acidification- What Exactly Happens?

I've started following @Scitable, an education resource from journal Nature. A few days back they tweeted a link to an article on ocean acidification.

Pay attention-
 
When CO₂ dissolves in seawater to produce aqueous CO₂ (CO_2(aq)) it also forms carbonic acid (H₂CO₃) (Eq. 1; Figure 1). Carbonic acid rapidly dissociates (splits apart) to produce bicarbonate ions (HCO₃^-, Eq. 2). In turn, bicarbonate ions can also dissociate into carbonate ions (CO₃^2-, Eq. 3). Both of these reactions (Eqs. 2, 3) also produce protons (H⁺) and therefore lower the pH of the solution (i.e., the water is now more acidic than it was — recall that pH is the negative logarithm of the proton concentration or activity, -log₁₀[H⁺]. Note, as illustrated in Figure 2, Ocean Acidification does not imply that ocean waters will actually become acidic (i.e., pH < 7.0).

CO_2(aq) + H₂O ↔ H₂CO₃ (1)
H₂CO₃ ↔ HCO₃^- + H⁺ (2)
HCO₃^- ↔ CO₃^2- + H⁺ (3)
 
However, when CO₂ dissoves in seawater it does not fully dissociate into carbonate ions and the number of hydrogen ions produced (and the drop in pH) is therefore smaller than one might expect. This is due to the natural capacity of seawater to buffer against changes in pH, which can be represented simply by:

CO_2(aq) + CO₃^2- + H₂O → 2HCO₃^- (4)

where CO₂ is effectively neutralized by reaction with CO₃^2- to produce HCO₃^-. The HCO₃^- produced by Eq. 4 then partly dissociates (Eq. 3), releasing protons and so decreasing the pH-which is where the ‘ocean acidification' actually comes from-but this drop is much smaller than for an un-buffered system. One can also think of the sequence of events resulting from dissolving CO₂ in seawater as firstly the production of HCO₃^- and H⁺, but because the equilibrium between HCO₃^- and CO₃^2- (Eq. 3) has now been unbalanced by excess acidity (H⁺), Eq. 3 goes to the left to consume some of the excess H⁺, and in doing so, also consumes CO₃^2-.

This is a wonderfully clear explanation of the chemistry of ocean acidification in terms of changing  concentrations or activity of CO2 (atmospheric),  CO2(aqueous), CO3 (carbonate) and bicarbonate (HCO3) ions, as there is later in the article on the negative and positive feedbacks in terms of the capacity of the ocean to absorb CO2 with rising ocean  temperatures.

The proportion of DIC present as CO2 is also affected by temperature, as illustrated in Figure 2. The consequence of this is that, as the ocean warms, less DIC will be partitioned into the form of CO2 (and more as CO32-), hence enhancing the buffering and providing a ‘negative feedback' on rising atmospheric CO2. Here, a feedback describes a mechanism that dimishes or amplifies an initial change and asribed the sign ‘negative' or ‘positive', respectively. For example, melting polar ice caps through global warming will reduce the amount of solar radiation that is reflected back out to space (the Earth's surface becomes less reflective), so producing more warming, which in turn will melt more ice, and so on — a positive feedback. A well-known positive feedback in the carbon cycle arises due to the decrease in solubility of CO2 gas in seawater at higher temperatures. In fact, this greatly outweighs the negative feedback described above, meaning that as the ocean surface warms, even more of the emitted fossil fuel CO2 will remain in the atmosphere.

And how do saturation levels of CO3 in sea water affect the stability of CaCO3 mineral species Aragonite and Calcite which organisms use to build skeletons? What effect will increase in ocean acidification have on organisms? ...

read on.. don't miss out on this chemistry lesson.

Return Times Of Great Himalayan Earthquakes

Bollinger, L., S. N. Sapkota, P. Tapponnier,Y. Klinger, M. Rizza, J. Van der Woerd,D. R. Tiwari, R. Pandey, A. Bitri, and S. Besde Berc (2014), Estimating the return times of great Himalayan earthquakes in eastern Nepal: Evidence from the Patu and Bardibas strands of the Main Frontal Thrust, J. Geophys. Res. Solid Earth, 119, doi:10.1002/2014JB010970.

This is a very detailed study taken up along  two strands of the Main Frontal Thrust in Nepal south east of Kathmandu. Along this fault, the Neogene foreland basin Siwaliks are thrust over the Indo-Gangetic alluvium.

Crustal shortening taking place in the Himalayas as a result of convergence between India and Asia is accommodated along a sequence of south younging thrust faults; The Main Central Thrust, The Main Boundary Thrust and the southernmost Main Frontal  Thrust, which is active today. All these thrusts are interpreted to merge into a single decollment called The Main Himalayan Thrust (a "master fault" along which India subducts underneath Asia). The cross section below shows these major thrust faults flattening at depth and merging into the Main Himalayan Thrust. Earthquake clusters in red dots shows a region of the Indian slab which as it slides under Asia, often (over decadal to millenial times scales) gets locked. Rupture follows, thus releasing that accumulated slip. These ruptures propagate southwards and occasionally break the surface along the Main Frontal Thrust.

Source: Bollinger et al. 2014

So, along this fault in front of the Siwalik  hills, there is evidence in the form of fault scarps and fault traces, offset and deformed strata, uplifted river terraces and stacks of colluvial deposits (sediments eroded from a fault scarp) of past earthquakes. This study examines this record in detail going back several thousand years. Its a long paper and there were sections where the reading is a hard slog and when my eyes glazed over, but it is rewarding to understand the techniques (geomorphic measurements, geochronology and shallow seismic profiling)  that have been applied to reconstruct earthquake history.

Abstract:

The return times of large Himalayan earthquakes are poorly constrained. Despite historical devastation of cities along the mountain range, definitive links between events and specific segments of the Main Frontal Thrust (MFT) are not established, and paleoseismological records have not documented the occurrence of several similar events at the same location. In east central Nepal, however, recently discovered primary surface ruptures of that megathrust in the A.D. 1255 and 1934 earthquakes are associated with flights of tectonically uplifted terraces. We present here a refined, longer slip history of the MFT’stwo overlapping strands (Patu and Bardibas Thrusts) in that region, based on updated geomorphic/neotectonic mapping of active faulting, two 1.3 km long shallow seismic profiles, and logging of two river-cut cliffs, three paleoseismological trenches, and several pits, with constraints from 74 detrital charcoals and 14 cosmogenic nuclide ages. The amount of hanging wall uplift on the Patu thrust since 3650 ± 450 years requires three more events than the two aforementioned. The uplift rate (8.5 ± 1.5mm/yr), thrust dip (25° ± 5°N), and apparent characteristic behavior imply 12–17.5m of slip per event. On the Bardibas thrust, discrete pulses of colluvial deposition resulting from the coseismic growth of a flexural fold scarp suggest the occurrence of six or seven paleo-earthquakes in the last 4500 ± 50 years. The coeval rupture of both strands during great Himalayan earthquakes implies that in eastern Nepal, the late Holocene return times of such earthquakes probably ranged between 750 ± 140 and 870 ± 350 years.

And in conclusion:

Certainly, the best path toward fully understanding whether and where great or giant earthquakes are likely to occur along the foothills of the highest mountain range on Earth will be to combine many exhaustive geomorphological and paleoseismological field investigations such as that presented here with extensive, long-term geodetic measurements, capable of narrowing uncertainties in estimates of the full seismic moment deficit.

Eyewitness Account Of A Great Nepal Earthquake

From 1934 - as reported by military officer Bhrama Shumsher Rana in his book  Mahabhukamp (The Great Earthquake) -

“The trees were moving as if they were agitated by a storm and it seemed that the tree-tops would touch the ground … Pillars and walls of houses were cracking,doors and windows slamming. With movements up and down, houses collapsed. Statues and decorations placed on top of temples and houses fell to the ground. The noise made by the houses collapsing was reminiscent of canon fire, as…during festivities. Because of the dust, it was darker and no one was able to see at more than a distance of 8 to 10 hands apart. This cloud of dust came from the city itself, invading open areas such as the Thundikhel—a large open and unconstructed space in the centre of Kathmandu—which was such as lost in a fog. People rushed to all these open spaces. Those who could not move themselves were seizing pillars, while others were searching to hide in shelters or ran to the fields. People would run on all fours like animals…”

“Cracks opened in the fields and roads. Water spurted from these cracks. There was flooding in all streams.Rivers like the Bagmati and Bishnumati were invaded by black muddy water. At some places, the water rose 8to 10 hands above the cracks. Many fields were flooded with water. Warm water and sand spurted from some of the cracks. The roads toward Balaju and Shankhamul were affected by a subsidence as large as one or both hands in height. There were few roads that were not cracked.”

via Bollinger et al 2014 

Kathmandu has been leveled and rebuilt several times over the past 1000 years or so. There are a series of posts on Dot Earth about damage done by the recent 7.8 mag Nepal earthquake, on building codes and earthquake preparedness.