The differing opinions among geologists on the nature of seismotectonic events reported in a sequence over the week are a cause for concern and indicators that study of glaciology and plate tectonics should be intensified as a matter of urgency in all Bharatiya universities.
Himalayas are an extraordinary recent (in geological time measure) phenomena which are vital for the life of nearly 3 billion people dependent upon glacial waters. These phenomena should be studied rigorously to unravel the nature of plate tectonic dynamics and impact on glacier accumulations and flows in the Himalayan foothills.
Himalayas are the life-source for Bharatam and interlinking of rivers to take the Brahmaputra flood waters to Kanyakumari is on the drawing board, blessed by a SC judgment. Flood waters of Brahmaputra alone --together with a contour canal on Sahyadri ranges paralleling the Konkan Railway-- have the potential to double the flows of waters in all rivers south of Vindhyas. It is possible to ensure 24x7 irrigated water supply to every farm assuring 3-crop per year cultivation and reach tap drinking water to every household in 6.2 villages of the nation.
NaMo governance should pace this National Water Grid programme on a fast track to get Brahmaputra flood waters to Kanyakumari and resolve the inter-state river disputes which muddy the political situation in many part of southern Bharatam. Hemavathy-Netravathy link is part of this interlinking programme and should be done in the next 6 months to almost double the waterflows in River Kaveri, resolving the tensions between Karnataka and Tamil Nadu states.
NaMo, do it. Put a National Water Grid Authority in place.
Kalyanaraman
| Tuesday , April 28 , 2015 |
| Tuesday , April 28 , 2015 |
Himalayas are an extraordinary recent (in geological time measure) phenomena which are vital for the life of nearly 3 billion people dependent upon glacial waters. These phenomena should be studied rigorously to unravel the nature of plate tectonic dynamics and impact on glacier accumulations and flows in the Himalayan foothills.
Himalayas are the life-source for Bharatam and interlinking of rivers to take the Brahmaputra flood waters to Kanyakumari is on the drawing board, blessed by a SC judgment. Flood waters of Brahmaputra alone --together with a contour canal on Sahyadri ranges paralleling the Konkan Railway-- have the potential to double the flows of waters in all rivers south of Vindhyas. It is possible to ensure 24x7 irrigated water supply to every farm assuring 3-crop per year cultivation and reach tap drinking water to every household in 6.2 villages of the nation.
NaMo governance should pace this National Water Grid programme on a fast track to get Brahmaputra flood waters to Kanyakumari and resolve the inter-state river disputes which muddy the political situation in many part of southern Bharatam. Hemavathy-Netravathy link is part of this interlinking programme and should be done in the next 6 months to almost double the waterflows in River Kaveri, resolving the tensions between Karnataka and Tamil Nadu states.
NaMo, do it. Put a National Water Grid Authority in place.
Kalyanaraman
| Tuesday , April 28 , 2015 |
Deluged by the dead- Pyres set water on fire | |
| SANKARSHAN THAKUR | |
 Victims of the earthquake being cremated in Kathmandu on Monday. (Reuters) The banks had run out of ground to stack pyre on. The bodies would not stop arriving, each attached to its tableau of the inconsolable. There was nowhere to go. They had to be waded in on a wobbly bamboo raft and set alight midstream. Smoke rose in blue plumes and hung still on the trees, evading the drifts. The forbidding pagoda of Pashupatinath brooded over the proceedings, the eternal eye presiding over ephemeral rites. Rush hour at the open crematorium by the Bagmati had run more than 24 hours. There was no sign it would come to ebb anytime soon. "We have been burning them all day and all night," said Tarak Nath, a crematorium handler, catching his breath between one smoked life and another. "You can tell this will go on for a while. Everybody wants their dead brought to Pashupati." An old man sitting haunched nearby muttered to no one in particular that he had heard more than 3,000 people were reported to have been consumed by Saturday's quake. (The official count stood at over 4,000 on Monday evening.) A woman's anguished shrieks rang over the hubbub and she swooned over the corpse she had just led in. Even in the great temple of the Lord, solace was hard to come. Mourners stood huddled around their dear departed across the black-stoned Pashupati concourse, awaiting their turn by the Bagmati. Straw mattresses lay piled in the temple's nooks, awaiting more dead. The good news thus far was that no after-tremors had followed till this evening; the bad news was that the first two days of shock had already claimed far too many. Just how many nobody can spell out yet, for large parts of the valley and the hills and the frozen Himalaya remained cut off and inaccessible. It will take time and patience and grinding work to tell the final toll. But it will climb in the days to come - most reckon, steeply. "Our experience in such disasters is that initially it is impossible to get close to a realistic figure of casualties," said Aftab Alam of Plan International, a UK-based disaster management concern. "There is usually no way to tell until search and rescue are completed. We are just starting in Nepal." Kathmandu wore a stricken look, beset by its unforeseen tragedy and flustered by foreboding over what may yet come. Rife rumour has constructed a surreal certainty of aftershocks about to come the next minute. A bird takes flight or a dog barks and people begin to fret and run. "Is it true that gathering clouds are a sign of another quake?" Rita Bhairab, a college student currently homeless, asked. "Someone said clouds will bring it on and I am scared to look at the sky." Rita seemed to herself suspect how unfounded her alarm was. But anxiety had overtaken her good sense. Around her, at the Tudikhel camp, where the Dharahara minaret stood till the other day, such worry rippled among the thousands displaced. Every kerbside, every roundabout, every little open space has turned into a bivouac of those the quake has tossed out of home. Tents have been erected in some spaces by the army and by aid agencies but only the fortunate ones are getting to sleep under some manner of cover. Many parts of the town are without water and power. The queues at fuel stations are long and multiple. The shops are mostly shut. There's lots to buy in a city that has suddenly suffered monumental deficit - food, medicines, drinking water, cooking gas, matches to light a candle, batteries to light a torch, linen to spread under the sky, far too many things that people suddenly lack for. But there's nobody selling them. Kathmandu isn't staring at a scarcity of essential goods yet. The airport is piled over with aid cartons, and the Prithvi highway - the main supply route from India - is open and running. But retail and distribution have become a concern. The citizenry remains panicked. People are not reporting to essential services desks, shop owners are not lifting shutters, taxi men are few to find and exorbitant to hire. Hospitals are stretched. Public transport is haywire. The Internet is comatose and telephony very fickle. Nepal is on a string. The capital rang incessantly with the scream and whine of sirens, a frantic ambulance, a fire tender tearing through, troops rushing to rescue. Overhead, today's clear skies rumbled all day with rescue and relief operatics - chopper gnatting about on sorties, gargantuan transport aircraft groaning in and out. Aid is pouring in overtime - from India, from China, from Pakistan, and from Israel among other nations. But as Yashraj Upadhya, a local aid worker struggling to evacuate aid crates from the airport red tape, remarked: "The stuff needs to flow, get around." Within stone's throw from the airport's periphery, smoke still rose over the dead at Pashupati as the sun came to set. And the Bagmati struggled to flow, quite unquiet. |
| Tuesday , April 28 , 2015 |
Quake, this time in Bengal | |
| G.S. Mudur | |
| New Delhi, April 27: Saturday's 7.9-magnitude temblor in Nepal may have triggered the earthquake near Mirik in Darjeeling district this evening, but scientists say the implications of the Himalayan quakes and aftershocks of the past 48 hours remain unclear. A 150km slice of the Indian crust slipping beneath the Himalaya lurched forward, marking Saturday's primary quake and releasing energy that has been showing up as aftershocks or more quakes like the 5.1-magnitude event in Mirik at 6.05pm. "The primary event may cause displacements elsewhere in the region, even at a distance. The Mirik event today could be one such consequence," said Malay Mukul, professor of earth sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. Some geophysicists believe it released enough accumulated tectonic energy to reduce the probability of a great earthquake of magnitude 8 occurring here again over the next several decades. But others caution that the length of Saturday's rupture is too short to rule out an even more powerful earthquake somewhere along a stretch between eastern Himachal Pradesh and northern Bihar. Their disagreement reflects the uncertainties still embedded in earthquake science. "This 7.9-magnitude event is likely to have released a significant enough amount of energy to push back the return of a similar earthquake," said Ajay Paul, senior seismologist at the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology, Dehradun. "Earthquakes cannot be predicted but this event makes it unlikely that this region will see an earthquake of magnitude 8 or so for, conservatively, perhaps another 50 years." A US geologist who has long predicted that the region should anticipate a great earthquake of magnitude 8 or so said that while the potential for a correspondingly larger earthquake in the region remained, a greater earthquake in the near future seemed unlikely. "We have no precedent in the Himalayas for a magnitude 7.8 earthquake triggering a magnitude 8 earthquake, so our best guess is that the recent earthquake will not be soon followed by a larger event," said Roger Bilham, professor of geological sciences at the University of Colorado. A longer return period would be significant from the perspective of protecting buildings and other structures from future earthquakes. Civil engineers have been arguing for retrofitting existing buildings and investing in earthquake-proofing of future buildings. The scale of construction makes the task overwhelming but, Paul said, a longer return period --- essentially, several decades of quiescence --- would allow time for northern and eastern India to protect future structures. But not all scientists think the region can be declared safe from a magnitude 8 temblor for now. "The energy released appears insufficient to preclude a future earthquake," said Kusala Rajendran, a scientist at the Centre for Earth Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. "Early seismic data analysis of Saturday's event suggests the rupture zone is about 150km long. That leaves a stretch of nearly 450km along this segment where there is still strain just waiting to be released." Some features of the earthquake are puzzling scientists. The Himalaya is older northward, and the epicentre of the primary earthquake lay on a fault about 80km northwest of Kathmandu, which is at a distance from faults in the southern zone of the Himalaya. "The younger faults in the southern zone are expected to be more active and more susceptible for rupture than the faults in the north," Rajendran said. "We still need to understand why this northern fault ruptured." |