Kosi Breaches Embankment, More Water Refugees In Bihar

I wrote sometime back that although there are been much focus in the media and also concerns raised in the National Action Plan on Climate Change (15 mb) about sea-level rise and coastal populations being displaced, the interior of the country will also see its share of water refugees as climate and environments change. A couple of months ago, a prolonged drought in the Bundelkhand region whose effect was amplified by decades of neglect of water conservation measures lead to a massive dislocation of people in the affected areas. Now, Bihar is witness to another wave of people fleeing a water crises, this time a near catastrophic flood of the Kosi river.

Nearly 2.5 million people living in the Kosi flood plains have lost everything, as the river broke through its constraining embankments near Kusaha village in Nepal on August 18 and flooded several districts in Bihar. See map below for a synoptic view.


As you can see the Kosi forms an alluvial mega-fan, a massive triangle shaped body of sediment which you can distinguish from adjacent environments due to the closely spaced meandering network of channels between the present day Kosi river and Basantpur to the east. Such sedimentary deposits form when rivers suddenly change gradients as the Kosi does when it flows out of the Himalayas into the Indo-Gangetic plains. This fan is enormous, about 180 kms long and 150 km wide. Westward tectonic tilting of the entire area has been the major controlling factor for the river shifting its course about 120 km from east to west over the last 250 years. I have labelled the various paleo-channels using this study as a rough guide.

About 10-15 million years ago rivers bringing sediment from the rising higher Himalayas formed similar alluvial fans in a depression where today the Siwalik mountains stand. The Siwaliks are made up of sediments of such ancient alluvial fans that - as the Indian plate pushed against the Asian plate - have been consolidated, hardened, compressed, deformed and uplifted to form undulating mountains. The locus of sedimentation has now shifted in front of the Siwaliks. The Himalayas are growing southwards. There is nothing more awesome than the geological forces that give shape to this dynamic planet.

The Kosi has breached the embankments before but they have been downstream of the barrages and canals that are used as safety valves. Engineers have been able to control floods by diverting water to the canals. But this breach occurred upstream of the barrage and canal system giving engineers no way of controlling the excess flow. The river has occupied one of the abandoned channels to the east of the present day channel as seen in the image below taken on August 24 2008.


Source: NASA Earth Observatory

I couldn't make out exactly which paleochannel from the image but the district of Madhipura has experienced the worst flooding, so could be one of the channel close to that village. It will be months before the embankment is plugged and the river returns to its original course. Meanwhile hundreds of thousand of people have become water refugees. I don't know how many will go back. It is possible that the topography and recognizable landforms will change significantly to make identifying the tiny plot of land that is farmed a messy process. In short the future looks bleak for large number of people especially those with no clear titles to land and there are plenty of those in Bihar.

The Kosi is such a dynamic system that people living along its flood plains will always face this risk. Embankments don't offer a permanent solution to flood control. The danger is that global warming might make the monsoons more erratic at the same time resulting in more concentrated periods of rains. Coupled with increased summer melting due to the accelerated decline of Himalayan glaciers, the situation will strain the capacity of embankments to hold the river back. It is a question of when not if till the next embankment failure.

High dams in Nepal have been proposed as a "permanent" solution. This experts say will result in better flood control. The worry is the extremely high sediment load carried by Himalayan streams. For example the life span of the Tehri Dam in the Gharwal Himalayas is now being reassessed to being only about 30-40 years as against the older estimate of a 100 years. Dams on the Kosi river will no doubt also be short lived. What will we do after the dam fills up with silt?

But then what can be done? I don't know. The problem really appears intractable for the near future. India simply does not have enough excess arable land to relocate people living in high risk areas like the Kosi flood plain. I mean where can these people go? In developed countries like the U.S. high risk areas seem to be serving as a magnet for people to settle in large numbers. Katrina has not stopped people from returning to New Orleans, and people still seem willing to relocate to Florida in the path of hurricanes and California in earthquake prone zones.

Over here people do return to areas of disaster but because they have little choice. It's either farm these plots or live in slums in big cities. Livelihoods, land use and habitation patterns will change slowly but until then the best we can do is set up better early warning and disaster management systems. This will hopefully save lives, but the problem of loss of property and livelihood remains.

Teaching Evolution in Florida and About Pseudo-Science in India

New York Times science writer Amy Harmon has a long article on the day to day reality faced by biology teachers as they try to explain evolution to students hostile to the very idea of evolution as the unifying principle for understanding life. The articles focuses on Florida because of a recent Florida Dept. of Education decision to make teaching and testing students in evolution mandatory in public schools.

This is eye-popping unbelievable:

With no school policy to back him up, he spent less time on the subject than he would have liked. And he bit back his irritation at Teresa Yancey, a biology teacher down the hall who taught a unit she called “Evolution or NOT.”

Animals do adapt to their environments, Ms. Yancey tells her students, but evolution alone can hardly account for the appearance of wholly different life forms. She leaves it up to them to draw their own conclusions. But when pressed, she tells them, “I think God did it.”

It's impossible for students to receive good science education if the teacher doesn't understand what science is in the first place.

Most of the article follows David Campbell a biology teacher who played a role in determining the new evolution standards, as he tries his best to explain evolution as theory and fact. Many students are not convinced. How can they when:

But in a nation where evangelical Protestantism and other religious traditions stress a literal reading of the biblical description of God’s individually creating each species, students often arrive at school fearing that evolution, and perhaps science itself, is hostile to their faith.

Some come armed with “Ten questions to ask your biology teacher about evolution,” a document circulated on the Internet that highlights supposed weaknesses in evolutionary theory. Others scrawl their opposition on homework assignments. Many just tune out.

There is serious indoctrination of children in dogmatic beliefs by church and at home. It's an uphill battle but one that science must win to prevent an entire generation growing up without a proper understanding of how the natural world works and how humans are an integral part of it.

On a related but different note, Selva asked in response to my post on astrology and earthquakes

Why do so many seemingly educated people - people who have been trained in the scientific method - have a soft spot for astrology in India.

The article was about an engineer and aspiring astrologer and if by educated people Selva meant engineers and doctors, my answer would be that it is so because many educated people, often those with higher technical degrees have never really received an education in the scientific method. You may well receive a degree with distinction in Engineering or even Medicine but that does not necessarily mean you have a training in the scientific method. Technical degrees don't spend any time on this kind of education.

Add to that is the pervasive influence of religion and mysticism children experience in our society. The rot probably starts at school level. We just don't have a systematic, aggressive science education programme to combat beliefs like astrology. I won't be surprised at all if many teachers in India express an "Astrology is a science" opinion similar to the "I think God did it" belief of Ms. Yancey of Florida. We may not teach astrology in school but we don't provide students with training to critically analyze pseudo-scientific claims either.

India's Medal Tally, Maybe Not That Bad?

Evolving Thoughts has a revealing graph of medals won by countries normalized by population. Gold medals per million and overall medals per million. Only countries who won at least one gold are considered.

Guess which country comes last

Source: Evolving Thoughts

But I find this comment more encouraging. What if we plot a graph of medals to expenditure. A sort of measure of return on investment. I suspect India will come off much more honorably. If we consider only government expenditure we might even come out on top, since many of our athletes spent their own money for training. And by government expenditure I mean the money actually spent on athletes, not the total budget, since much of it is likely squandered on bogus conferences, "study tours" and other expenses for the parasitic sports officialdom. Anyone with the numbers?

Identifying Descendants of the First Humans in India

When did Homo sapiens enter and settle in India? What was their subsequent population history? Can we identify the descendants of the first settlers in contemporary Indian populations or has subsequent migrations removed any genetic evidence of the pioneers? Anthropology.net has a post on research which adds to our understanding of these questions.

Mitochondrial DNA (MtDNA) has been used quite extensively to trace the genetic ancestry of populations. MtDNA has some advantages in such studies. MtDNA is passed down independently of the nuclear genes. It is not subject to the recombination that results in different parts of the chromosomes being swapped around over generations. MtDNA in contrast is inherited as one unit. Different genes on the mitochondrion therefore have experienced the same history. Such chunks of DNA passed down as single units are called haplotypes. Also MtDNA is passed down only via the female line and so you would be tracing your maternal ancestry. This makes tracing your ancestry using MtDNA less complicated than using nuclear genes.

Now populations isolated from other populations will be evolve over time a unique set of variations on their MtDNA which will define a particular MtDNA haplogroup. If you compare the MtDNA of one population with another you should be able to tell from the differences they have accumulated and our understanding of the mutation rate of sections of MtDNA, how long ago they shared an ancestral mitochondrion. These are the types of studies that this recent research has done on MtDNA on several tribal populations of India. Tribals were chosen because cultural, ethnographic and linguistic studies indicate their ancestors may be early settlers of India and they appear to show the least amount of mixing with later immigrants. So they offer the best chance of preserving genetic signals of the earliest settlers.

This research has shown that several of the sampled tribes for example the Korku and the Kuruba contain a high frequency of the M2 haplogroup, which using the tracing back of genes method I mentioned has been found to have originated around 50,000 years ago. The M2 itself belongs to a larger family of MtDNA lineages within the M macrohaplogroup, which is thought to be a descendant of the African L macrohaplogroup. This indicates that populations migrating out of Africa around 50-60,000 years ago entered India, became isolated from other Asian populations and evolved a unique M haplogroup out of which M2 is the oldest lineage. Figure below shows the distribution of the M2 haplogroup in the sampled tribes.


Source: The earliest settlers’ antiquity and evolutionary history of Indian populations: evidence from M2 mtDNA lineage

So the picture seems to be that there is a 50,000 year old genetic continuity of the female line preserved in some tribal populations, making them likely descendants of the first Homo sapien settlers in India. Notice the near complete absence of M2 from northeast tribes. Did the immigrating population not settle the northeast? Maybe a species adapted to a woodland-savanna ecology may have initially found it difficult to occupy a mountainous thickly forested terrain. Or were there original settlers in the northeast also but who were later removed or assimilated by more recent immigrants?

And what about human presence in India before 50,000 years. There is plenty of evidence of that too. But that human belonged to an earlier species Homo erectus, which also migrated from Africa. The tool record of erectus in India goes back to 1.2 million years ago. Did the immigrating Homo sapien populations encounter resident Homo erectus populations. Could they have interbred or had erectus already gone extinct. Unfortunately we don't have any fossils of erectus to tell us any details of its presence in India. But can genes tell us anything more? The mitochondrial trail goes back only 50,000 years, but could there be other genes in Indian populations of even more ancient ancestry?

Happy First Blogiversary To Me

No, it is not today. It was two weeks ago but I missed it!

Its been just over a year since I started this blog. My motivation to start writing was really a personal one. I like writing about science. The decision on what topics to concentrate on was also easy. I am passionate about geology and evolution and there was never any doubt that these would be the central themes of this blog. I decided early on to concentrate on discussing the science itself. Geology and evolution are not widely read in India and although the blogosphere crosses national boundaries and reaches audiences worldwide I did have in mind primarily Indian readers. There is definitely a lacuna in covering these topics in Indian science writing of any sort and so I hope this blog is helping bridge that gap a little.

The choice of these topics and writing primarily on nerdy science stuff did mean narrowing the size of the potential audience but that is something I expect and accept. I remember a conversation with a geology faculty during my Master's training in Pune. He emphasized that once you are specializing in science you will start living in a self contained universe, corresponding and interacting with a very small group of people. You love what you do, you have to strive for quality and not worry too much about how many people read your work. It will be a very small number. I thought about that when a grand total of about 8 people read my PhD thesis!

That was before the blogosphere erupted. Today a super specialized scientist can publish a paper that 8 people read but simultaneously publish a blog post which is read by thousands. I can't claim that my posts are read by thousands, but it is something to strive for. It's good to know that there is a large audience for good science writing, even writings on very specific topics. I guess today my blog is doing okay for such a niche subject area. More than 8 people have read my writings and I have a small but growing subscriber base. I would love to have more readers and more interaction with science fans. I would love to have the Indian media read my posts and improve their coverage of science. Yeah, dream on!! That's hoping for too much!

But I do hope to keep writing and it will be interesting to see if my blog remains engaging enough to entice more readers to spend a few minutes of their busy day visiting this site.