Thursday, December 6, 2012

The future vision of India



Hello all! In the past blogs I have focused on the present state of India, or even what has happened in the past. This is the blog that looks into the future. There will be 3 different time periods we will look at; 1000 years from now, 10,000 years from now, and 1,000,000 from now. Now remember the first blog when we looked at how India collided with the Eurasian plate? That will play a huge roll in this blog. But lets get started.

India 1000 years from now:

Despite that erosion and weathering are attacking the Himalayas; probably with frost wedging, a processes that gets water into the cracks of the rocks and freezes inside the rock, breaking it apart bit by bit, the Himalayas are only going to continue to grow. This is because the Indian-Australian plate is continuing into the Eurasian plate. There will not be much of a difference of change but the Himalayas and the Tibetan plateau will continue to rise because of this. The reason why the Tibetan plateau will continue to rise is due to India sinking underneath the continent, creating a double crust and making the world try to reach equilibrium. This is called isostacy, since there is more crust being added, the ground is trying to reach the middle ground, so to speak. The mass wasting events won’t do much damage to the large Himalayas because they are so large.  

I used this picture to illustrate the movement from India is pushing up the Tibetan plateau due to isostacy. This is the best picture to find because it shows the movement of India uplifting. Photo courtesy of http://www.geoportalen.no/geofarer/sichuan/


India 10,000 years from now:

The infamous large mountains are only going to grow larger as India collides into them. But the country India will have head way into the Eurasian plate and there will be a bit of land that is in the mountains. This movement of India will affect its climate, just a little. The end of India will possibly move from the equatorial low into the subtropical high making the nice moist end of India move into a possible semi- arid region, as the windward side of the country will continue to be moist.

This picture shows where India is placed in terms of where the Hadley cells are. This shows that the movement into the Eurasian plate will cause the very tip and possibly Sir Lanka to move completely into the subtropical highs. Photo courtesy of http://serc.carleton.edu/eslabs/weather/3b.html.
India 1,000,000 from now:

If you skipped from present day to now, you would see the significant difference of the size of India which is still moving into the Tibetan plateau. The Himalayas would be even bigger despite the weathering and erosion, because the giants are only continuing to grow. The only real weathering that could be really possible would be frost wedging due to how cold it is at the summit of the mountain. Other places have more opportunities like the loss of vegetation at the base could create a rock fall, the angle of repose would only help with the change. 

In conclusion:
India is going to disappear, sadly. Each year it sinks underneath the Eurasian plate due to plate tectonics and the only evidence of India will be conserved in the Himalayas, which will one day be weathered and eroded away. The end of the Himalayas will be the last of the country India.
Goodbye all!

Monday, November 12, 2012

Climate of India


Hello all! Welcome back to our geologic trip through India. The focus of this blog will be on the weather in India. India is in the northern hemisphere, conveniently placed in between the latitudes of 0 degrees and 30 degrees. The significance of this is that India is very warm due to how close it is to the direct rays of the sun.

This picture shows the placement of India with latitude and longitude. Photo from
http://www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/india_map.html


In this stretch of the world the world’s air, the cold air is descending from the high altitude and warming on the surface. This is from hadley cells. Hadley cells are cells that are hot air that rises, eventually the air cools. When the air cools the air falls and creates little cells around major latitudes.

These are the hadley cells moving up and down the Earth. These help promote warm weather around the country India because the warm air is moving closer to the equator, which is with warm air. Photo courtesy of http://www.atomosyd.net/spip.php?article42
This makes this stretch of land tropic in nature but in the chart below, you can see the climate ranges anywhere from arid to humid subtropical on the country. The warm air warms this area, making India a fairly hot place to be.


This map shows the multiple climates around India, for the most part India is a warm and wet area due to the warm current and the monsoon seasons in the summer months. These are helped by the ITCZ moving upward in the earth's latitude. Photo courtesy of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:India_climatic_zone_map_en.svg

Besides being in between the equator and the subtropical humid zones, India is surrounded by a warm ocean current that makes an already warm and wet area on the coasts, with the ITCZ this creates the monsoon season. This is because the intertropical convergence zone, the area of heavy storms around the equator, moves up in latitude due to the Earth’s tilt. The combination of these two creates a very humid storm, one that lingers for the summer months. The fact that they get the added moisture in the summer it is easy to see why the winter months can be very dry like the upper portion of the country. India has a very interesting climate and there is only more to discover. Until next time!

Thursday, October 11, 2012

Weathering and Mass Wasting in India

In India, there are four large hills and mountains near Mumbai and since Mumbai is close to the ocean, I decided to focus on the products of mass wasting, weathering, and erosion, which all are closely related, near Mumbai for this blog.
These are the hills and mountains in India. I am focusing mostly on the Western Ghats. Since the western Ghats are so close to the ocean it is easy to assume the rocks that will come from this time period will be breccia rocks, since they will be angular and unsorted.
Photo courtesy of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Indiahills.png

To start I will focus on the landslide on the Bombay-Goa highway in 1983, yes a little outdated but the picture below illustrates how steep the hills are close to the road which, like in 1983, could create a landslide and instead of only 450 km of road destroyed, people could get hurt1. Since the vegetation is so high on the slopes the slopes seem to be more stable now but if there were a loss of vegetation the hills may be in danger of toppling on top of the highway, especially since the climate is so wet.
This is a section of the Bombay-Goa highway. This picture illustrates how dangerous the drive is through. The steep slope and very visible rainfall are a beautiful equation for a dangerous situation if rock were to break. There has already been a landslide in '83, destroying a good portion of road.
Photo courtesy of http://www.rang7.com/photo/2822.htm


















Since there are so many hills and mountains in India, weathering and erosion is a big thing. Oceans are typically where sediment from weathering and erosion create the future indicators of geologic time. In the pictures of the marble below you can see that jointing, where rocks break on weak planes, create cracks and fissures in the nice marble in Jabalpur, India, which is a form of physical weathering. There is also chemical weathering of the rocks in Jabalpur. The water pounding on the rocks can dissolve the minerals in the rocks, a process called dissolution. On the tips of the rocks you can see how the water carved to its current stream, where there is evidence of this dissolution. India is turning out to be a geomorphologist's dream.

These two pictures are of the Marble Rocks in Jabalpur. These rocks show evidence of dissolution.
Photo courtesy of http://www.hearty-india.com/2012/05/marble-rocks-jabalpur-picture-gallery.html
This picture is the same place as the two above only this picture illustrates the jointing that the rocks are going through, also you can see where the weak planes are in the rock.
Photo courtesy of http://travel.sulekha.com/visiting-jabalpur-bhedaghat-marble-rocks-bheraghat_india-travelogue-4754.htm

Citations
1. South Asian Association For Regional Cooperation | HomeSouth Asian Association For Regional Cooperation | Home. N.p., 09. Web. 11 Oct. 2012. <http://www.saarc-sec.org/>.

Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Of Tectonic Plates and Deccan Plateau


Hello all! Now it is actually time to learn a little about India. One of the really cool things about India is that it was once it's own continent. Due to plate tectonics it crashed into the tectonic plate that Asia is on. This kind of plate tectonics is called convergent continent- continent which ended up creating the Himalayas. Which can create a difficulty when trying to get to another place outside of India. 


This is a visual of what India looked like moving  up into the Eurasian plate.
http://www.google.com/imgres?num=10&hl=en&safe=off&biw=1366&bih=667&tbm=isch&tbnid=H1Sza3k95sQyxM:&imgrefurl=http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/dynamic/himalaya.html&docid=QnieGNo3Ohs9TM&imgurl=http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/dynamic/graphics/FigS8-2.gif&w=234&h=424&ei=jpNkULvQCuybyAHinoH4BQ&zoom=1&iact=hc&vpx=791&vpy=94&dur=47&hovh=302&hovw=167&tx=111&ty=139&sig=108773547050919634466&page=1&tbnh=139&tbnw=77&start=0&ndsp=18&ved=1t:429,r:9,s:0,i:168 

 But that is not all, particularly where Mumbai is, it is on something called the Deccan Plateau where there was at one time a flood basalt, which is an area of lava spills. Pretty cool right? Who would have known India was so active in terms of geography? Which brings a lot of tourism.

Here is what the Deccan Plateau looks like in India.  The layers of black show the basalt flows.
http://www.google.com/imgres?hl=en&safe=off&biw=1366&bih=667&tbm=isch&tbnid=SZCuF99DbdhUHM:&imgrefurl=http://wa7.wikispaces.com/Deccan%2BPlateau&docid=vA8-hMvUPRl1RM&imgurl=http://www.hudsonfla.com/indiadeccan1.jpg&w=768&h=522&ei=a5RkUL71DMW3ywHeiYHIBA&zoom=1&iact=rc&dur=358&sig=108773547050919634466&page=1&tbnh=127&tbnw=182&start=0&ndsp=20&ved=1t:429,r:11,s:0,i:132&tx=110&ty=57 

This shows the extent of the Deccan Plateau and Mumbai , which is called Bombay in the picture,  happens to be apart of the pretty picture of layers above.
http://www.google.com/imgres?hl=en&safe=off&sa=X&biw=1366&bih=667&tbm=isch&tbnid=dgZAIjsMU4hfoM:&imgrefurl=http://www.mantleplumes.org/Deccan.html&docid=sg2QhzpO7q_3aM&imgurl=http://www.mantleplumes.org/images2/Deccan1Fig2_550.gif&w=550&h=567&ei=rpRkUO6DJ-ybyAHinoH4BQ&zoom=1&iact=hc&vpx=860&vpy=278&dur=94&hovh=228&hovw=221&tx=90&ty=127&sig=108773547050919634466&page=1&tbnh=134&tbnw=130&start=0&ndsp=21&ved=1t:429,r:11,s:0,i:171




Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Introduction!

Hello all! My name is Lexi and I am an undergraduate at the University of Colorado in Denver. For my Geography project I have chosen Mumbai, India. There are a few reasons for my choice of India, looking at the other blogs I saw plenty from all across the world but I hadn't seen one on India. Second of all, I have a book that I am reading that is set in India, called Tiger's Curse. So enjoy this blog about the geography of Mumbai, India.
Found at tigerscursebook.com

This picture of Juju beach in Mumbai. From the website of http://www.bugbog.com/gallery/galleryindia/mumbai-india.html