Going Hiking In Pangaean India

I have been thinking unhappy thoughts ever since I came upon this map of Pangaea with today's political boundaries overlaid on it.

Where would I have going hiking in Pangaean India?

1) The Himalayas, crown jewel of hikers arose begining early Cenozoic and reached their bewitching heights in the mid Miocene -Pliocene.

2) The Western Ghats, the poor man's Himalayas, arose in the Cenozoic too after the breakup of India from Madagascar (88 mya) and Seychelles (66 mya). They represent heights reached due to an initial high rift flank, amplified by denudational isostacy and crustal upwarp due to intraplate stresses propagated southwards from the Himalayan collisional zone.

3) The Eastern Ghats, a line of mountains parallel to the east coast of India also arose much later than Pangaea forming during and after the breakup of India with Antarctica about 130 mya.

4) The Vindhyan and Satpura mountains in central India are composed of Proterozoic and late Paleozoic -Mesozoic rocks resp. but much of today's relief also represents topography rejuvenated since mid Cenozoic, ultimately related to stresses from the Himalayan collision.

5) The Aravalli mountains in Rajasthan is a Proterozoic orogenic belt but probably didn't have much topography during Pangaean times.

For most of the time period from Cambrian to Carboniferous the Indian shield was a tectonically stable area. Pangaean India was a place where a vast peneplain had developed over most of the Indian shield in response to long lasting denudation. This cycle of deep weathering and erosion lasting tens to a hundred million years would have stripped and ultimately flattened the Aravalli and south Indian orogenic mountains, exposing mountain roots and lower crustal rocks like granulites and charnokites. The result would have been a subdued topography with a flat horizon as far as the eye can see, occasionally interrupted by gentle rolling hillocks made up of more resistant lithologies like quartzites and charnokites. 

Subsequent episodes of uplift and erosion has destroyed this flat topographic surface from all over the Indian peninsular region but some remnants of this peneplain termed the Gondwana surface can be observed at around 2400 m mantling the granulites of south India around the popular hill stations of Ooty and Kodaikanal in the Nilgiri mountains.  It has been lifted to these heights during Cenozoic uplift of the Western Ghats.

The only places of considerable relief would have been the emerging Permo-Triassic rift basins of the Satpura, Pranhita Godavari and Mahanadi belts in the central and eastern part of  country. A horst graben structure would have resulting in a ridge and flat valley type topography. Not particularly attractive for a challenging hike. Plus it was really swampy and hot in those rift basins.

I wouldn't have liked to live in Pangaean India. I am too spoilt by views like this one, which appeared only in the Miocene.

Photo: Nanda Devi and Namik Glacier in the Kumaon Himalayas, November 2012.

An Ecologist's Passionate Plea To Protect The Western Ghats

In March 2010 the Ministry of Environment and Forest, India,  constituted the Western Ghat Ecology Expert Panel to study and recommend protection for the ecologically sensitive Western Ghat region. The panel was headed by Dr. Madhav Gadgil. It came up with the idea of a  graded approach to protection, essentially sequestering some areas from any mining and other development,  limited development in other areas and so on. Central to their philosophy of protection was that the voice of the local people be heard. All decisions regarding development would be taken only after extensive consultations with the people of the villages being affected by various developmental projects.

The Indian government, both Central and various State bodies did not like this plan. They undertook what is becoming a depressingly familiar route. They constituted another committee termed "High Level Working Group" to relook the original recommendations. Predictably, the new report by this high level group guarantees protection for a much smaller region of the Western Ghats and does not see a role for village level committees to participate in decisions regards protection and development.

Dr. Madhav Gadgil has come out strongly against this new report headed by Dr. K. Kasturirangan and has written an open letter to him in The Hindu:

An excerpt-

India’s cultural landscape harbours many valuable elements of biodiversity. Fully 75 per cent of the population of lion-tailed macaque, a monkey species confined to the Western Ghats, thrives in the cultural landscape of tea gardens. I live in the city of Pune and scattered in my locality are a large number of banyan, peepal and gular trees; trees that belong to genus Ficus, celebrated in modern ecology as a keystone resource that sustains a wide variety of other species. Through the night I hear peacocks calling, and when I get up and go to the terrace I see them dancing.

It is our people, rooted in India’s strong cultural traditions of respect for nature, who have venerated and protected the sacred groves, the Ficus trees, the monkeys and the peafowl.

Apparently, all this is to be snuffed out. It reminds me of Francis Buchanan, an avowed agent of British imperialism, who wrote in 1801 that India’s sacred groves were merely a contrivance to prevent the East India Company from claiming its rightful property.

It would appear that we are now more British than the British and are asserting that a nature-friendly approach in the cultural landscape is merely a contrivance to prevent the rich and powerful of the country and of the globalised world from taking over all lands and waters to exploit and pollute as they wish while pursuing lawless, jobless economic growth. It is astonishing that your report strongly endorses such an approach. Reality is indeed stranger than we can suppose!

And here is another article by Dr. Gadgil and Ligia Noronha on the subversion of the Gadgil report. 

 

Sunday Humor: A Professor's Prayer

Another classic from PHD comics:

Its In The Syllabus

From PhD comics:

The tables can very easily be turned on you, the faculty, when a student goes over the syllabus with a tooth comb and then holds you to every dot and comma in it.

My friend who is an igneous petrologist and faculty at a local university here in Pune saw the nasty side of the syllabus centered education. As a researcher, my friend is highly enthusiastic about his work and often launches into long excursions about it during lecture time. He didn't think the students minded until he posed a question about his research in an exam. There, some students objected... it was not in the syllabus you see!  They took their complaint to the Vice Chancellor of the University and had the exam annulled.

This happened at a post-graduate level i.e. these were students studying for their Masters degree, a level at which students should be learning not just the fundamentals of a subject but also exploring the boundaries of knowledge about a topic by diving into the research literature and hungrily biting at anything extra that comes their way. It makes you wonder about the motivation and mindset of these students that they so quickly and vehemently protested against a faculty who actually wanted to go out of his way and teach more than is required of him.

I hate to think that the narrow minded focus on rigid syllabus and passing exams has reached such a level that it is destroying any curiosity to learn more.

Again! Charles Darwin Was Wrong.. About The Tree Of Life

Well.. I guess the headline "Darwin Was Wrong" always sells!

But The Guardian should have thought a little before publishing this. It is an article which appeared sometime back but is the most viewed in the science section and is about how the recognition of lateral gene transfer i.e. the transfer of genes aross taxonomic groups is proving Darwin's idea of a tree of life wrong.

Read this passage:

Evolutionary biologists say crossbreeding between species is far more common than previously thought, making a nonsense of the idea of discrete evolutionary branches.

I don't think their science correspondence Ian Sample thought enough to see the contradiction in this passage.

Cross breeding between species implies that species exist in the first place which in turn means that there has been in existence discrete evolutionary branches i.e. long periods of independent evolution of different populations so as to have accumulated unique features recognizably different from other populations. Its only when there are discrete unique branches is it possible to recognize lateral gene transfer between the two!

For example, coyotes and wolves are closely related animals that occasionally interbreed in the wild. But the fact that we can recognize coyotes from wolves means that these are two discrete lineages having diverged from a common ancestor at some point in the past and have since followed separate evolutionary trajectories accumulating unique traits along the way. Occasional interbreeding between the two does not wipe away all these differences. They remain two distinct branches on the canid family tree.

Gene trees are not the same as species trees. Gene trees reflect the evolutionary history of a gene which may be transferred across taxonomic groups by a variety of processes. Early in the divergent history of populations genes may be exchanged through interbreeding. Or, for example a not so insignificant portion of the genome of mammals is made up of fragments of genes from other species transferred into us long ago by viral infections. However, that does not change the historical fact that the coyote and the wolf, or for that  matter humans and chimps diverged from a common ancestor. Species trees or the tree of life reflects this history of speciation. So, Darwin's tree of life idea is about diverging populations from a common ancestor. These populations despite occasional transfer of genes maintain reproductive integrity and become different enough over time. Life has become diverse over time by such branching. Darwin was not wrong about that.

And what does one make of this confused para- Last year, scientists at the University of Texas at Arlington found a strange chunk of DNA in the genetic make-up of eight animals, including the mouse, rat and the African clawed frog. The same chunk is missing from chickens, elephants and humans, suggesting it must have become wedged into the genomes of some animals by crossbreeding.

Does that mean there was interbreeding between mouse, rats and the African clawed frog? Ridiculous!

Update May 16 2013: There is another potentially misleading passage in the article:

But modern genetics has revealed that representing evolutionary history as a tree is misleading, with scientists saying a more realistic way to represent the origins and inter-relatedness of species would be an impenetrable thicket. Darwin himself also wrote about evolution and ecosystems as a "tangled bank".

Now, the "tangled bank" has nothing to do with lateral gene transfer and interbreeding at all. It should not be conflated with evolutionary relationships being described as a web or a thicket. Darwin was describing the complex inter-dependencies in an ecosystem as organisms compete and co-operate with each other for resources.