Summer In My Neighborhood

Its been a blazing week with temperatures over 100 deg F. Pune this past few days has been as hot as I can ever recall. Time for ice tea and cool stewed mango drinks. Evenings are very warm too. We are giving our rugby kids water breaks every 10 minutes.

But walking through the small lanes near my house are sights like this one:

Summer can be glorious too. And the alphonso mangoes and cold beer is helping!

V.K Gaur On Earthquake Research, Jaitapur Seismic Risk And Role Of Scientists

The Hindu carried an interview with Vinod Kumar Gaur, seismologist with the Centre for Mathematical Modelling and Computer Simulation. His work on the seisimic risk at Jaitapur southern Maharashtra where a nuclear power plant has been proposed was criticized by the Indian government and his colleague Roger Bilham denied entry into India on the grounds that he violated the terms of his tourist visa. I share the suspicion of many that the Indian government is too sensitive and insecure about anyone raising questions about nuclear safety and reacted pettily by banning Dr. Bilham.

Some excerpts:

You have been vocal in your scepticism of Jaitapur as the location for a proposed 10,000 MW nuclear power plant...

Not for the construction of the plant, which can be designed with safety features. But India’s western coast, a well-recognised zone of potential seismic vulnerabilities, is likely laced with ancient faultlines buried under sediments and waiting to spring back like a piano accordion under continental compression. It is intriguing that Jaitapur [on the Maharashtra coast], the chosen site for the world’s biggest nuclear power plant, should have been declared seismically safe without refuting these possibilities.

My concern is that the various geological proxies of faultlines around Jaitapur and their possible implications on the plant and public safety have been neither adequately studied nor communicated. A clear picture of Jaitapur’s vulnerabilities and their quantification, needed in order to calculate the level of safety measures to be incorporated, is missing from the earthquake hazard assessment of the site. 

What, in your opinion, prevents a more thorough safety analysis of Jaitapur?

We have every technological possibility to exhaustively investigate the subsurface geology of Jaitapur including high resolution seismic imaging that can be carried out at a fraction of the project cost.

Scientists tend to downplay earthquake risks. It is convenient to do so. You keep everybody happy when you maintain status quo. But science only grows by addressing challenges, by considering alternative views and designing incisive experiments to prove or refute conjectures.

 and he has some harsh words about the lack of outreach role played by Indian scientists.

....Sadly, our scientific culture lacks responsibility and rigour towards public safety, and so denies society the advantage of information, and consequently resilience, against the natural disaster.

Read the full interview here.

My previous posts on this topic:

1) Politics And Pettiness In Indian Seismology
2) Note To Indian Govt: It Is Pointless Banning Seismologist Roger Bilham

My Criticism Of K.S Valdiya's Paper Published In Current Science

and Valdiya's reply was not satisfactory at all..

To those unfamiliar with the sequence of events:

1) Giosan et al publish a paper in the May 2012 issue of PNAS on fluvial geomorphology of rivers around the Harappan civilization and conclude amongst other things that the Sutlej and Yamuna rivers got diverted from the channels now occupied by the river Ghaggar (Haryana Punjab plains) to their present day course by Late Pleistocene. This meant that the Harappan civilization along the river named Ghaggar -also identified as the Vedic Saraswati by many- was watered by a monsoonal river and not a glacially connected river.,

2) I write a blog post of this paper on June 15 2012. I comment that some Indian geologists working on this problem accepted the scenario of a glacial Ghaggar /Saraswati during Harappan times without critically assessing the evidence.

3) My blog post appears on the Indo-Archaeology forum.  In the confusion due to many cross links my comments about the role of Indian geologists are misattributed to Giosan et al.  Giosan tries to set the record straight. K.S. Valdiya based on his correspondence with S. Kalyanaraman also confuses the source of those comments and misattributes them to Giosan et al in his article in Current Science. Valdiya accuses Giosan et al of diminishing the research of  Indian geologists partly because he misidentifies Giosan et al as the authors of those comments and partly because of Giosan's comment on the Indo Archaeology forum  that they have only referred to 'papers and authors presenting reliable data and facts’. S. Kalyanaraman forwarded this comment to Valdiya who then regarded it as a slight on the work of Indian geologists.
 
These below are my words that got misattributed to Giosan et al:

A geological narrative constructed without rigorous evidence has been promoted to support a theory of cultural evolution in northwest India.

and

..  now be revised or at the very least these geologists  need to admit that their theory has been seriously challenged.


4) I write a blog post on the geological problems in Valdiya's Current Science article.

5) Giosan et al protest the misattribution in the Correspondence section of February 10 issue of Current Science.

6) My comments and Valdiya's reply to Giosan et al and my comment published in the April 25 issue of  Current Science.

phew... I didn't know writing a nerdy geology blog will land me in such a controversy! :)

Moving on to Valdiya's reply to my comment I want to elaborate on Valdiya's denial that he misrepresented the work of other authors.

Review Article: Recurrence Of Great Subduction Zone Earthquakes

Open Access in Current Science: 

Kusala Rajendran

The last decade has witnessed two unusually large tsunamigenic earthquakes. The devastation from the 2004 Sumatra–Andaman and the 2011 Tohoku-Oki earthquakes (both of moment magnitude ≥ 9.0) and their ensuing tsunamis comes as a harsh reminder on the need to assess and mitigate coastal hazards due to earthquakes and tsunamis worldwide. Along any given subduction zone, megathrust tsunamigenic earthquakes occur over intervals considerably longer than their documented histories and thus, 2004-type events may appear totally ‘out of the blue’. In order to understand and assess the risk from tsunamis, we need to know their long-term frequency and magnitude, going beyond documented history, to recent geological records. The ability to do this depends on our knowledge of the processes that govern subduction zones, their responses to interseismic and coseismic deformation, and on our expertise to identify and relate tsunami deposits to earthquake sources. In this article, we review the current state of understanding on the recurrence of great thrust earthquakes along global subduction zones.

The figure above shows the  Cascadia subduction zone, Pacific coast of N. America (source Rajendran 2013) . I looked through the Reference section and saw a number of recent papers addressing both the evidence for past earthquakes as well as the impact of the 2004 Sumatra earthquake on the Indian coastline. The acknowledgements indicate funding for this paper from the Ministry of Earth Sciences, Govt. of India. Its good to see basic geological research into subduction zone earthquakes being supported this way.

On The Use Of The Word Archaic In Writing About Evolution

In an interesting article on hybridization in human evolution in Earth Pages by Steve Drury I came across the following sentence:

Multi-regional evolution posits archaic populations  originally living in and outside Africa being  gradually assimilated by migration and interbreeding that transferred modern traits everywhere yet retained some regionally distinct features of the archaic groups. The first model clearly has to be modified as evidence accumulates for some degree of hybridisation with archaic groups outside Africa. The second of the two pre-genome ideas seemed to be rendered obsolete by the DNA evidence for significant interbreeding between early immigrants from Africa and Eurasian and Asian populations of earlier archaic migrants – Neanderthals and Denisovans respectively – whereas modern Africans show no sign of recent contact with these archaic groups. However, not all regions of the genome have been examined for signs of more universal hybridisation.

What meaning should one read into the term "archaic". A common misconception is that archaic means "less evolved".  But when migrants from Africa came in contact with Neanderthals or Denisovans or some other unnamed human population, it was a meeting between two human populations who had been evolving for the same amount of time since their divergence from a common ancestor. So there is no sense in saying that one group was less evolved than the other.

So then,  archaic could mean that at the time of contact one population was resident in the area for a long period. They were early migrants into that area, making them an old population. Or, archaic could mean that one population had been isolated from the common gene pool for a longer period of time than the other, meaning, one population branched off much earlier from the ancestral population.  The branching event could have been a migration resulting in genetic isolation. Or, archaic could mean that one population resembled the common ancestor more than the other population i.e. it had retained many ancestral traits and had undergone less morphological changes, while the other population had accumulated more new morphological traits since diverging from an ancestral population. In all the above three, the term archaic could well be used to describe a living population. Lastly,  archaic could be used to describe features that are now extinct.

When "modern" humans migrating from Africa met Neanderthals in Europe, they were not meeting  people who were less evolved , but people who had been evolving along a different trajectory for as long as any other then living branch of humans. We think of the jutting brow ridges and barrel chest of Neanderthals as archaic because that trait is no longer visible or very rare in humans living today. We see it only in fossils. They are features of antiquity.

But at the time "modern humans" met Neanderthals there was no archaic or modern in the sense of less or more evolved. Neanderthals were archaic in the sense that they were the earlier residents of Europe and had been genetically isolated from African populations for a long time. Both populations had some archaic traits in the sense of traits retained from their ancestors. Both also had changed morphologically, having evolved some new traits since their divergence from a common ancestor.  There was no way of knowing then which collection of traits would survive till today to be categorized as modern and which would be consigned to archaic in the sense of being extinct.  At that time they were just two sibling populations with their own unique evolutionary histories.