Field Photos: Driving Through A Basalt Countryside

The most prominent topographic feature of the Deccan volcanic province is the Western Ghat Escarpment that runs north south, roughly parallel to the west coast of India. The escarpment is the edge of a deeply dissected easterly tilted plateau, a result of Cenozoic crustal movement. Near Pune, several streams flowing eastwards through narrow valleys have been damned and the backwaters of these dams have some great views of a basalt landscape comprising deep valleys and spectacular exposures of basalt cliffs.

Last Sunday I drove with some friends along the backwaters of Mulshi dam. In the interactive embedded map below (Pune in south center) the western ghat escarpment is the arcuate north south ridge line on the left side of the image. You can count more than ten dams situated to the east which have flooded narrow valleys. If you pan north south you will see more reservoirs. The water is used to generate electricity and for urban and agricultural use.


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All pictures courtesy Bharat Parikh and Rajesh Sarde.

The countryside was lush. Wild grasses in full bloom.

A wide grassland meets distant peaks and ridges.

Steep basalt cliffs. Notice the layering of the lava flows.

The edge of the plateau is penetrated by fracture sets oriented in the NNW-SSE direction parallel to the coast and a NE-SW set. Some of these represent extensional stresses developed during rifting of India from Seychelles around 66 my to 65 my years ago and may have been conduits for the magmas. There are plenty of dykes intruding the lava pile oriented in a north south and north-east south-west direction. There are fracture sets too which may represent a later Cenozoic stress regime related to the uplift of the province. These provide a structural control on drainage.

The image below shows a north-east south-west oriented fracture set (red arrow) which has controlled the dissection of a deep valley. I call it Anil's valley in honor of my friend who told me about it. White arrows point to the NNW-SSE oriented lineaments. They may represent dykes or fractures.

 A view of Anil's valley. It is a box canyon with near vertical walls of basalt.

The main basalt flow type in this region are compound flows. These are made up of discrete blobs of lava that overlapped and coalesced with other blobs of lava to form a compound unit. During one eruptive episode several compound units may be stacked to form a thick lava pile.  These compound flows have weathered over time into a steep hummocky topography with domal summits accentuated by erosion along fractures. (Picture below taken on a previous field trip in February 2010).

A lonely road in the woods.

Bed load! A dry bouldery stream bed. Its just three weeks after the rains stopped and the streams in the upland areas are dry already. Small farming communities make by mostly through water in the monsoons and then rely on small springs to water their fields. Life gets quite hard here after the rains.

Food of a civilization. Yellow ripe paddy grown in the lowlands near the water source. Lava flows in the backdrop. You can smell the fresh rice as you pass by.

Until next time..

How Scientists Are Scamming The American People

From the inimitable The Daily Show, Aasif Mandvi reports on how scientists are scamming Americans for selfish financial gain and confusing them by teaching them facts and rational inquiry. The indoctrination begins -  as Mandvi finds out - at labor camps for the young known as school science fairs.

Check it out.

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U.S. Shale Basins Map On GeoCommons

GeoCommons, the public mapping site run by FortiusOne Inc. has added a map of shale basins of the United States to its database. Go here for the metadata and to create your own map. You can also download this data either as a kml file or a shape file or as a text file.

Since I last visited the site, Geocommons has brought more analytical capabilities into the public domain. Users can now select from a list of spatial analytical tasks like data merging, data aggregation, buffer, intersection, clip. A lot of the familiar GIS spatial functions are now available from the cloud.

You can search for geology and other data sets and can also subscribe to the feed to keep track of new additions. This is really a great open access mapping tool with a very attractive interface and plenty of options to thematically display your map attributes. You can also contribute data. Uploads can be in kml, shape or text format. You can also import data available through a web URL i.e. you can import say a kml file from another server or data that can be shared through a WMS (Web Map Service) which is a protocol for streaming map images over the internet. This way you are linking to data that is stored somewhere else. Your display will automatically update when the primary data changes.

Its really worth your time browsing through this site exploring their data collection and experimenting with making maps.

Darwin And Hitler And Other Interesting Evolution Talks And Readings

A compilation of evolution related news I came across the last week or so:

1)  How do new species evolve? Peter and Rosemary Grant have undertaken a monumental multi-decadal study of the finches of the Galapagos islands. They explain the conditions that lead to speciation, part of the Brilliantly Illuminating And Lively Lecture Series.  If you don't have time to sit through the talk, the Panda's Thumb has a summary of their findings.

2) Donald Prothero, author of the book Evolution: What The Fossils Say And Why It Matters writes about recent occasions of creationists organizing geology field trips with the aim of reinterpreting the geological record to fit a young-earth creationist view point and of creationists presenting papers at the Geological Society of America meetings.

3) Darwin and Hitler- that old bogey keeps getting raised again and again. At the Planets of the Apes blog Faye Flam puts down that bogey... again! The follow up posts  ( 1 2 3 4 ) on this topic are worth reading too.  P Z Myers at Pharyngula also pitches in and points to an upcoming scholarly work by Michael Lackey which shows that the Nazis were very much a Christian Reich.

4) At the Cosmos and Culture blog anthropologist Barbara J. King explains Paleolithic diets in the context of the recent fad adopted by some to revert to the diet of our hunter gatherer ancestors as a way to healthy living.

Encouraging The Return of Foreign Trained Indian Scientists

India is promising a rapid expansion of its higher education infrastructure. To cope with the demand for well trained faculty it is encouraging the return of Indian scientists who have been studying and researching abroad.

Current Science has carried an interesting series of articles  (all open access) on the problems of meeting the increasing demand for faculty and researchers.

P. Balaram in a lead editorial - citing other indicators such as the willingness of researchers to return - suggests, giving some examples from China that an obsession with foreign trained scientists and a neglect in improving the local talent pool may end up causing some harm to the research environment.

A. Lohia disagrees with the word "Luring" used by P. Balaram in his editorial and expresses faith in the initiatives taken by the government to encourage the return of Indian scientists.

Mukesh Pasupuleti  agrees that the word "Luring" is quite  appropriate. He writes about the experiences of a prospective returnee.