Joshimath Sinking

By now, the unfolding tragedy in the mountain town of Joshimath in the Uttarakhand Himalaya is national news. Land subsidence is destroying homes. Many families have been left with no choice but to leave and resettle elsewhere. 

Journalist Kavita Upadhyay has written a good explainer on Joshimath's predicament. 

How heavy, unplanned construction and complex geology is sinking Joshimath.

And yesterday, News9 Plus with Kartikeya Sharma invited Kavita Upadhyay, along with another journalist Nivedita Khandekar, and geologist Hars Vats, to discuss not just Joshimath but also the vulnerabilities of Himalayan towns across the mountain arc. 

Their conversation is on Spotify- Joshimath Sinking. 

Repeated warnings by geologists were ignored for decades. As Sunita Narain points out in this Down To Earth article, engineers and technocrats with little understanding of the environmental and ecological issues are in charge of passing plans for big power projects. For Joshimath, all the relief measures are probably too late to make the town safe again, but if the destruction of this important historic town does not usher in a national soul searching about the way in which the Himalaya are being developed for tourism and hydropower, then I fear there will be much more pain and suffering in the future. 

Articles: Dehradun, Early Dogs, Warm Blooded Dinos, Louisiana Delta

Sharing some links from the past few days:

1) Dehradun.

A story of the transformation of a beautiful hill town to an ugly unplanned urban center. We shrug resignedly at many such tales from across the country. This one is of Dehradun. Himalaya towns can only be described as disasters in the making. Unscientifically built infrastructure on steep slopes, no garbage management resulting in enormous stray dog and pig populations roaming the streets, and a dwindling water supply. Yet these towns continue to grow, pointing to worsening opportunities for making a livelihood in the Himalayan rural landscapes. The 'smart city' reference is the ultimate insult of all.

Vanishing landscape of ‘smart city’ Dehradun.

2) Early Dogs.

The early stages of dog domestication may have seen a marked behavioral shift appearing before any distinct morphological change. This change in behavior, arising from docile wolves or 'protodogs' living near human camps would have entailed a change in diets.  Scientists have compared wolf and dog like remains from a 28,500 year old site in the Czech Republic. They looked at the dental microwear pattern of these two groups of canids and noticed that the dog like canids show a pattern consistent with eating more hard brittle foods. The wolves show patterns consistent with eating more flesh. 'Throw this dog a bone" wasn't an insult then.

Dental microwear as a behavioral proxy for distinguishing between canids at the Upper Paleolithic (Gravettian) site of Předmostí, Czech Republic

write up: Dog domestication during ice age.

3) Warm Blooded Dinos?

Were Dinosaurs warm blooded like mammals? This debate has raged on for decades. Bone growth patterns have not given any unambiguous evidence of body temperature regulation. A new method known as clumped isotopes may provided a more reliable indicator of estimating body temperatures. Fossilized dinosaur egg shells contain the original calcium carbonate from which these shells were built. A variety of carbon isotopes (C12, C13) may bond with a variety of oxygen isotopes (O16, O17, O18) in the carbonate molecules (CO3). The degree of bonding or clumping of the heavier isotopes i.e. C13 to O18 varies with the temperature during mineral growth. Clumping is more at lower temperatures.

Scientists compared this C13-O18 clumpiness in dinosaur egg shells with C13-O18 clumpiness in the calcium carbonate of mollusc shells from the same fossil bed. Mollusc geochemistry is taken to be a proxy for the ambient conditions. They found out that the egg shells grew at temperatures between 25- 43 deg C, while the molluscs record growth at 25 -30 deg C. This suggests that dinosaurs were capable of maintaining a higher body temperatures than their surroundings.  As a carbonate sedimentologist, I found the details of methods in this paper  of great interest. The researchers used a variety of techniques to make sure that the egg shells had not been altered or subjected to higher temperatures later in their history, which would have made them an unreliable archive of the original temperature during growth. The analyzed egg shells came from Sauropods, Theropods and Ornithischians, a sample across the three main groups of dinosaurs. Very interesting study.

Eggshell geochemistry reveals ancestral metabolic thermoregulation in Dinosauria

write up - Fossil Eggshells Suggest All Dinosaurs May Have Been Warm-Blooded

4)  Eroding Louisiana Coastline.

Over the past several decades, barrages and levees have drastically reduced the amount of sediment that the Mississippi river is carrying to the sea. As a result, the famed Mississippi delta and coastline is eroding away. Efforts are on in a Boston warehouse to figure out a way to reverse this change. An ambitious engineering project which aims at opening up a portion of the levee to funnel sediment into the Barataria Basin south of  New Orleans is being planned. The hope is that the new channel will transport and deposit enough sediment to rebuild part of the endangered delta. A scale model built in a warehouse near Boston is testing the efficacy of this idea.

Fascinating to read the various problems geologists and engineers have to deal with when grappling with modifying nature at this scale.

To Save Louisiana’s Vanishing Coast, Build a Mini Mississippi Near Boston.

Groundwater Worries: Saving Pune's Hill Slopes

 SCRAP HCMTR - MAKE PUNE A MODEL FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

I wrote a short note on my Facebook page on Pune groundwater and its growing importance in response to a citizen's petition to save natural recharge areas that occur on several of Pune's hill slopes. There is a proposal for two roads (the petition mentions only one) to cut across these hills, which will result in the paving over of the recharge surface. In the picture below, the roads will be built at two levels across the slopes behind the green and yellow colored building.

 Forested Slopes of Law College Hill

Besides the threat to groundwater, there are other objections to the road, including its outdated route  and its preference for private vehicles over public transport.

Pune nature lovers and others too... do consider signing the petition and help save part of our precious remaining natural heritage.


Cross Posted from Facebook:

A couple of days ago it rained about 75 mm in central parts of Pune. If you consider a 1 sq.km area around your neighborhood, about 75 million litres of water came crashing down in a few hours. If just 2 percent of that infiltrated into the ground, about 1.5 million liters were added to our ground water resource through a 1 sq. km surface area.

Surprised that rock can hold this much water? Those who grew up swimming in the Tilak Tank of old won't be. It was fed by a natural spring. At any one time the pool held about 2.5 million liters of water. The Tilak Tank hole in the ground would have held much more, but excess water was being drained into a nullah. More recently, the Suvarnarekha building on Prabhat Road was demolished, and the builder excavated a hole for a basement. It soon filled up with ground water. It held about 5.5 million liters of water. As the builder started pumping out the water, more kept rushing in. Over a one and half year period up to 100 million liters of water was likely pumped out. All this water held under a few hundred square meter area!

Pune receives about 650 mm of rain annually. That means 260 billion liters of water falls yearly over a 400 sq.km area. How much of that is infiltrating into the ground.. 5 percent, 10 percent, 20 percent? No one knows for sure and the amount will be highly variable across a surface. But we do have an idea how much is being taken out. A recent estimate by ACWADAM, one of the leading experts on local hydrogeology, puts our annual extraction of groundwater to be 3-4 TMC, which amounts to 80-100 billion liters of water. This suggests that we are extracting more than the natural recharge, since ground water levels are beginning to dip at many places.

The Pune dam cluster collectively store 826 billion liters of water out of which 315 billion liters are allocated annually to Pune. Our increasing use of ground water at 80-100 billion liters annually, underscores the critical role ground water is beginning to play in our lives.

It is imperative that we redress the growing imbalance between extraction and natural recharge. We can do this by individual action of leaving ground uncovered around our homes, and also by protecting larger swaths of recharge areas where infiltration rates are particularly high. The Vetal - Hanuman Tekdi slopes have been identified by ACWADAM as an important natural recharge zone. They must be protected from being covered over by concrete by the proposed HCMTR and Balbharati roads.

Please sign this petition for saving Pune's tekdi slopes from being destroyed! Say no to the HCMTR and Balharati Roads.

SCRAP HCMTR - MAKE PUNE A MODEL FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

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A small addition to the above post. An earlier study by Raymond Duraiswamy and colleagues published in 2009 had identified the Hanuman (Law College) Hill slopes as potential recharge zones. The map below shows recharge potential of parts of Pune as identified using hydrogeologic criteria. The red rectangle (my addition) roughly outlines the hill slopes under threat of being paved over by roads. The study highlights an area inside the red rectangle (Table 20: Balbharati Building) as an ideal site for enhancing recharge and also points out old quarries in nearby places which could be repurposed to store runoff water for recharging the underlying aquifers. Unfortunately, some of these quarries are now being encroached by slums and also being used as dumping grounds for construction debris. 

Source: Raymond Duraiswamy, Vrishali Dumale and Usha Shetty 2009 - Geospatial mapping of potential recharge zones in parts of Pune city.

ACWADAM will be soon releasing a detailed study of the ground water situation of Pune along with maps of aquifers. I will post that information when it is made available.

The Aquifer Underneath My House

... is very prolific.

The photo above taken in March 2012 is of an excavation for a building about half a kilometer away from my home in Pune, India. The developer struck water at around 20 feet below the surface. Water began gushing out of sheet cracks in the basalt rock. Within a couple of days the water level had risen to just a few feet below the surface and then stabilized.

The water level you see in the picture is not the water table but the potentiometric surface. The developer had punctured a confined aquifer. Water in this type of aquifer is under hydrostatic pressure. The puncture or hole is this case creates a pressure gradient and water flowed from the aquifer (high pressure) into the hole (low pressure). It rose until the water pressure at the bottom of the hole equaled the water pressure in the aquifer at which point water stopped flowing out of the aquifer and hence stopped rising in the well /excavation.

In the picture below the red arrows point to the sheet cracks from which groundwater is seeping out.

Geological Monuments Of Hyderabad Disappearing

The disappearance of wetlands and forests makes for news and media articles, but a pile of rocks? I came across this slideshow in The Hindu on the natural rock piles so typically seen in the city of Hyderabad. The rock is granite and it has weathered along sets of cracks to form these rounded boulders that are left balancing precariously. These piles of balanced rocks that form hillocks are called Tors.  The graphic below depicts the formation of Tors.

Source

These formations are being quarried for construction material and Hyderabad is fast losing its unique landscapes.

Source

I hope the city decides to protect at least a few of these as national monuments.

Documenting The Urban Subsurface In India

In a correspondence with Current Science A.K. Singhvi of the Physical Research Lab Ahmedabad proposes that an opportunity is presenting itself to understand the shallow subsurface in and around cities. Urban areas are undergoing a construction boom and excavations and pits are being dug all over.

Wouldn't it be great if both government agencies and Universities start documenting the geology with the aim of creating a database useful for urban governance.  Sometime back I had mused along similar lines with regards to the aquifers underneath Pune. Large number of borewells are being drilled within and on the fringes of the city to supplement surface water supply. I had suggested that we could further our understanding of the shallow and deep aquifers by enlarging the existing groundwater monitoring programs.

Implementing this though would require embedding a certain flexibility and adaptability to how the concerned geological agencies and University departments work. I am a little pessimistic that currently our agencies may be too wedded to their working plans to deviate from their day to day job descriptions. University faculty too need to shed an insular mentality and proactively network with and develop collaborations with builders and drillers. My experience is that many are only intent on covering and finishing the "syllabus".

These new developments could be a boon for basic data collection on the shallow urban subsurface. But is the Indian geology community opportunistic enough to grab what is being offered?

Mapping India: Another National GIS Effort Launched

From a trickle to a flood; the number of government backed initiatives to develop map based applications intended to reach and involve citizens to help manage India's natural and urban resources have increased over the last decade.

The latest as reported by the Economic Times is the National GIS, what appears to be a massive effort to standardize available spatial data and build resource management applications, served out over the web to different users.

I don't have enough details to comment on the particulars, but some thoughts -

The effort is touted as something of a brand new venture, although I suspect that existing applications and ongoing efforts will be grafted onto this new entity. For example, Bhoosampada (new link) allows users to browse and search for landuse and landcover data. And the National Urban GIS Mapping Mission which has promised to build standardized urban data sets is supposed to be underway to map urban areas and develop applications to aid urban governance.

My hope is that the new National GIS is not a massive duplication of efforts and that these older intiatives with some improvements will be brought within a wider umbrella effort.

There is going to a citizen layer in this application which will allow citizens to geo-tag their complaints. The principle is admirable but better governance is more hostage to a mindset than it is to technology. Today, I can either email or call or put up a status on the Pune Municipal Corporation or Pune Traffic Facebook page about a particular grievience, but the response rate is abysmal. Unless a method of personal accountability is tied up with the complaint workflow, I don't see how the citizen layer will lead to a better government -citizen partnership.

Still, it is something of a wonder that more and more government data locked up previously is making its way into the public domain. ...slowly..but that counts for progress nevertheless.

Mapping New York's Future 200 Years Ago

Sam Roberts in the New York Times writes on the 200th birthday for the certification by city commissioners of a map by John Randel which subdivided Manhattan island into a two dimensional street grid with rectangular plots on which modern Manhattan arose.

The grid was the great leveler. By shifting millions of cubic yards of earth and rock, it carved out modest but equal flat lots (mostly 25 by 100 feet) available for purchase. And if it fostered what de Tocqueville viewed as relentless monotony, its coordinates also enabled drivers and pedestrians to figure out where they stood, physically and metaphorically.

“This is the purpose of New York’s geometry,” wrote Roland Barthes, the 20th-century French philosopher. “That each individual should be poetically the owner of the capital of the world.”