Geology and Geography – Don't hold your breath

Ofotfjord

Quickly let’s get the geology out of the way. Ofotfjord is 78 Kms long and 553 m deep at its deepest. The name could refer to the shape of the fjord on a map; its forks look like the talons of an úfr, the locally common Eurasian eagle-owl. The port of Narvik sits pretty far inside the fjord, roughly where the talons begin to fork. The landscape was formed in what is called the Caledonian Orogeny, about 430 million years ago, when the paleo-continents of Laurentia, Baltica and Avalonia collided and created the metamorphic rocks what we see now at the surface. In our times this seam is open again. (If this text confuses you, see this beautiful video of 750 million years of geological history). At the northern end of the continent, tens of thousands of years ago, glaciers began to sculpt the metamorphic rocks, the Caledonian nappe, into the deep valley that we saw.

The weather was extremely changeable that day. The tide was out. We found a beach and walked down to it (it is probably called Langstranda). Herring is common in these waters in winter and mackerel in summer. One indication was the fishing village that we could see in the distance (we visited a different one later). It is said that Orca often enter the fjord to hunt fish, but we couldn’t sight a pod. On the other hand, looking up we saw a White-tailed eagle (Haliaeetus albicilla). Satisfied with this lifer we went on.

The weather kept changing. On one side the finger of the fjord broadened out. I could see a bridge across it at that end, the Hålogaland Bridge. We would take this later. First we crossed over the Rombak Bridge and drove east for a while until we reached the Sildvik waterfall.

The water was frozen into hard blue ice. Three people were climbing this frozen waterfall. We watched as one of them took a few steps up. I noted the equipment needed: crampons, pick axes, helmets and harness. I’d seen different colours of ice, so I walked back to look for examples. It turns out that the rock here has lots of iron. It’s not surprising given the huge seam in nearby Kiruna which has not been mined out in more than 125 years. So I found red ice all along the road. We got back in the car soon, made a U-turn and drove on to Narvik.

This is for Esther: Who takes a rocket any more? You’re shot out of a gun from a planet to a moon, with your oxygen tanks strung on a lanyard behind you. If I’m bored, I crotchet. All I need is in this warlock’s bag.

Monsoon’s waterfalls

Seasonal streams are common across India when the monsoon arrives. I’ve been on jeeps which crossed dry stream beds in an absolutely arid land. Such streams must be replenished every year by the rains. When these streams form in the Western ghats we see waterfalls. The Family remembers childhood trips to seek out these seasonal waterfalls and has fond memories of getting wet in these cascades. When we see them in passing while zipping along the expressway, she sighs at the changes a lifetime makes.

A precious sight

Storms at sea had resulted in the clouds piling up along the southern slopes of the Himalayas. We’d not had too many clear days, but the day we took a southwards detour from Trongsa towards Gelephu, the weather was perfect. The air was wonderfully clear. We watched troops of golden macaques and turned back north and from a vantage point on the road we saw Bhutan’s highest peak: Gangkhar Puensum (the altitude is variously recorded as 7550 meters to 7570 meters above sea level). From the shape of the peak, I think that’s the one in the middle. This was truly a precious sight because the mountain lies on the northern border of Bhutan and we saw it from somewhat south of the center.

Bhutan forbids climbing of mountains higher than 6000 meters, so Gangkhar Puensum is often said to be the highest unclimbed mountain in the world.

Regularities

Cleavage planes! I’d heard of this from my earliest classes on the crystallization of salts. Apparently, if you take a crystal and give it a sharp tap it will break neatly along a plane. Before modern techniques like x-rays, people used these planes to guess at the symmetries of crystals. Unfortunately I never had a large enough crystal to try it with. So I was quite thrilled on a walk in Bhutan when I noticed that the blasts which had cleared the hillside for the road had resulted in a clear cleavage plane. I took this photo edge on, so the plane shows up as the discontinuity along the middle of the photo. The tap that breaks a crystal, salt or rock, can be delivered either by a hammer or by a stick of dynamite.

I first noticed the regularity with which this moth had laid its eggs on the glass while I sat inside a moving bus and watched the moth cling to the outside of the window. When we stopped I got down to take a photo. The first instinctual identification from a group of people from the western Ghats is the Handmaiden moth (Syntomoides imaon). That is also what Google Lens says. But this is wrong, as you can see by comparing it with curated images on Moths-of-India. One possibility is that it belongs to the genus Caeneressa, of which only the species C. diaphana ranges as far west as Bhutan. But this is a sheer guess. Apart from the identification, the regularity of the array of eggs is interesting. It seems that the moth lays eggs as it sweeps its abdomen from side to side, moving outward (or inward, I did not see which) as it reaches the extreme ranges of its swing.

Bhutan Laughingthrush + Birds of the Week Invitation CXIX

One of the birds I’d hoped to see in Bhutan was the Bhutan Laughingthrush (Trocalopteron imbricatum). I saw this small bird only twice, but since it is a skulker, hiding in undergrowth, I consider myself lucky. In appearance it resembles the Streaked laughingthrush (T. lineatum) which I’d seen several times to the west. Unlike that widespread species, this one is seen only in Bhutan and northeast Assam.

The colours are distinctive, this has gray ear coverts unlike the dull rufous of the T. lineatum, and it has no streaking on its crown. It also lacks the rufous wing panels of the T. lineatum, and has a somewhat different call. Little is known about its diet and foraging behaviour. It breeds between April and June, so we had seen this individual in the middle of the breeding season. But we saw no sign of its mate.

The family of laughingthrushes (Leiothrichidae) is highly speciose, and since many of them are restricted to the Himalayan region, I was curious about their origins. A little search led me to a study of the genetics of this family which indicated that it originated in the middle of the Miocene epoch. The Leiothrichidae have weak flights and do not migrate. So the geologically rapid speciation of this family must be due to rapid changes in climate which disconnected and reconnected biomes multiple times. The reasons for these climatic changes have to be sought in the geology of the time.

The Miocene is the geological epoch between 23 million and 5.3 million years ago. The major climate changes during this period were globally warmer climates than today, and an increase in aridity. One of the major factors in this was the separation of the Antarctic, and the beginning of the ice sheets over it during the mid-miocene. The other was mountain building: the Sierra Nevada and Cascades were formed in North America, the Andes in South America, the rifting of the African plate leading to the East African highlands (where primates began to diverge), and the upthrust of the Tien Shan mountains. This last change, along with the separation of the Mediterranean and Tethys seas caused by the northward drift of the African-Arabian mass and its joining with Eurasia, created aridity in the Himalayan region.

Globally the changes led, on land, to the retreat of forests and the growth of grasslands, and, in the oceans, to the growth of kelp forests. Around the mid-miocene the Tethys sea dried up, the Tibetan plateau was uplifted, and rapid climate changes began in the homeland of the laughingthrushes. Subsequent uplift of the Tien Shan allowed a monsoon circulation to set in, and this region began to approach its modern climate. These changes not only allowed the laughingthrushes to speciate, but also to use the newly opened Arabian pathway to reach Africa.

This is an invitation to share your post about birds, their photos, or their behaviour. If you post about birds this week (starting today and up to next Monday), you could leave a link in the comments, or a pingback, for others to follow. You don’t have to have a recent photo, nor do you have to post a photo of the same bird as mine. Do use the tag “Bird of the Week” to help others find your post, and remember to visit other people’s posts. For more information see the main landing page for this invitation.

Birds of the Week CXVIII

Across the middle Himalayas

Since I cannot post from the Himalayas, I have to schedule them before I travel. The mean height of the Himalayas is about 6100 meters above mean sea level. However, most towns and roads, and tracks that I walk through are below 3000 meters. Already at this height network connectivity fades; as roads wind between high mountains lone cell towers drop out of sight. Above that height the air thins and the terrain is dry. It is less than ideal for human habitation. Still, some towns and villages can be found up to about 4000 meters. There is not enough economic power here to lure network providers to place their cell towers here. Above that you see only travellers and adventurers, roughing it out like ancient 20th century people.

On a winter walk along the Singalila ridge I could see this dry grass everywhere, covered with frost in the hollows, even in the middle of the day. We walked from village to village, through tracks where we saw some other walkers from time to time. But otherwise it was just us, the open sky, the mountains and the distant calls of birds.

The geology and the ecology of the Himalayas has established itself over about 10,000,000 years. Our species is about 100,000 years old. The national borders that we see today are about 100 years old. So, instead of talking about India, Nepal, China, Bhutan, I find it easier to understand this geography in terms of the plants and animals, and the underlying geology. Geologists study a fault line called the Main Central Thrust, which lies about the middle of the east-west extent of the range. As a person interested in birds and plants, I also find it easy to think of the differences between east and west Himalayas. This changes rather abruptly around the Kali Gandaki gorge: the lowest point in the high Himalayas between Annapurna and K2. From here the Kali river flows west, and the Teesta flows east. The photo above was taken just to the west of this division, but in the middle heights, near Mani La.

Even further west, I followed the valley of the Indus northwards through Kashmir and Ladakh. This photo was taken just before we began to leave the fertile lands of the middle heights. An hour’s drive from here took us to the Zoji La pass, where we began to pass into Ladakh. All these photos were taken within a year, on multiple forays to the mountains. It has been a long time since we travelled there. After we get back to the plains and its dense connection of cheap network, I hope to show you some new photos.

Wilderness is the crack in a tame world

A phone call from a friend standing at the south pole told me that there is no real wilderness left in the world. Humans and their technology cover the world. But not entirely. There are gaps and cracks in this taming. You can still fall through and see the wilderness that the world once was, and will be sometime. The beautiful scene above is not a garden, but a piece of wilderness left deliberately to itself as a sanctuary for plants. High up in the wind swept plateaus of the western ghats, low plants have evolved to make the most of a brief abundance of rain in poor metallic soil. The Kaas plateau is a refuge created for them: an ounce of protection is better than a pound of rewilding. Most of the year it looks like a bare rocky plateau with dry grass. But for a few weeks at the end of the monsoon there is a changing carpet of flowers.

At the other end of the continental plate, where its movement to the north west has raised high mountains prone to earthquakes, oak and pine forests abound. We took a short walk through it in the first rains of the monsoon. Human feet have marked a slippery route through the slopes of the forest below Hatu peak in the Shimla hills where we traversed the line between oak and pine. The grass is abundant enough for horses and cattle to graze on. This place is wild, will perhaps never be completely tame, but highways, towns, farms are a short distance away.

In the middle of the monsoon we saw the inverse. On the sea facing slope of the old maritime fort of Cabo de Rama in Goa a garden has begun to run wild. The local vegetation has recolonized cleared beds, and some of the garden plants have over-run their borders. In a decade the last blurred lines of the garden will fade into wilderness. This is a process we saw over and over again in Goa. The wild comes back, as it will sometime in the future when we are gone.

But here is a different wilderness, rapidly disappearing. The lesser Florican (Sypheotides indicus) is very rare, and very endangered because of habitat loss. The scrublands of northern India where it made its home have largely become agricultural land, in a repeat of the degradation of land that is common in Europe and the Americas. Farmers near Ajmer have now leave fallow lands between fields to allow these birds to nest. Community involvement in protection is a new story that is evolving in parts of the world. This is an older social contract struggling to establish itself over the greed that is the legacy of the modern empires which carried a certain style of industrial capitalism across the world in the 18th century.

I came across a similar story in Kazakhstan. This is the beautiful Kolsay lake in the Ili-Altau mountains, which is part of Tien Shan range. The lake is artificial, being created by a dam on the Kolsay river. At one end of the lake there is a rapidly expanding apron of tourist utilities. But the rest of the area around the lake and river has been left wild. Hikers and campers, and even other construction, is permitted only in a narrow ribbon in the mountains. Decades of unthinking exploitation of nature have left an industrial base looking for more minerals to extract. But at the same time a romantic social consciousness of a nomadic past helps to preserve certain wild places.

Nepal is even more committed to preserving its wild places. Its small industrial base cannot out-compete its income from tourism that is attracted by unspoilt landscapes. You can see this tension in the photo here. The three rhinoceri were hemmed in by two jeeps full of photographers. It was a tense situation, which could have exploded at any time. Fortunately, the drivers of both vehicles has enough experience to give the animals space to be free to explore ways out of the impasse. A similar tension is the cause of Nepal’s unsettled politics, but there are innovations being tried to balance the needs of a decent life for people and of preserving the wide wild world.

Steep

Gurushikhar is the highest peak of the Aravali mountains, and is a mere 1722 meters in height. That’s because the Aravali mountains were raised about 1100 million years ago and have had a long time to erode down to the present elevation. It was too hot to walk the road to the top, so we took an auto to the parking below the peak and walked from there on. The astronomical observatory is out of bounds, but there is a temple a little way up the hill in a natural cave. As a result there are a few houses around. Above us a bright pink one towered like a cliff. But when you get there it is just two stories high.

Lava and lichen

A weekend in the Aravali mountains gave me a lot of interesting photos of rocks. My travels are usually dominated by the Western ghats and Himalayas. These are relatively new features of the earth. The western ghats and the Deccan shield date from the breakup of the supercontinent of Gondwanaland about 130 million years ago. The Himalayas were raised during the ongoing encounter between the Indian and Asian plates which started about 65 million years ago. In contrast, the Aravali range was formed in a truly ancient encounter, about 1100 million years ago during the Mesoproterozoic era, between the Aravali and Bundelkhand cratons, now stable parts of the Indian plate. This makes it one of the oldest features on the face of the earth.

The rocks were are strongly weathered. I climbed on top of a large but easily negotiable rock and looked at its texture. There were clear flow patterns visible on the rock. What was it? Could it be the shape of lava flows that occurred when the rock was formed? I guess not, since these mountains were raised in a collision of two ancient plates. These are metamorphic rocks, violently changed from their volcanic origins by the tremendous pressure of colliding continents. Then it must be evidence of water on the surface in a region that is now a desert. This rock was raised here in the Mesoproterozoic era, when evolution had just begun to create sexual reproduction. 1100 million years is a long time, and there must have been many episodes of flooding and drying in the history of this particular rock.

There were lichens growing on the rocks. I’ve only just begun to think about lichens. I must learn to recognize them. Right now all I know is that the lichens you see in the photos here are crustose lichen. Their powdery texture makes me believe that they belong to the genus Lepraria, but I could be wrong. Lichens are the original symbiotes: a coming together of photosynthetic organisms such as cyanobacteria and fungi. But that’s not all. There are often yeasts and other bacteria which live on these substrates. They were the original colonizers of land. It is amazing to think that before lichens started growing on rock there were no grasses, trees, and shrubs; no insects, mammals, or birds. The continents were bare rock. They eroded rock, a little faster than weather, grinding it into tiny pieces that they held together until the lichen died in a hundred years or so. This speeded up weathering just enough that other life could take hold on land. Lichens evolve, and speciate. When you have the leisure to sit on a rock and think about these immense stretches of time, it is just amazing.

Desert highway

We landed in Udaipur airport, about an hour outside the town, and took a taxi to Mount Abu. The journey by road took us around three hours. Most of it was on a flat four lane highway, with a perfect surface. It seldom rains here, so the road does not have to be resurfaced often. Only the last part of the journey, the thousand meter climb into the Aravalis, the northernmost range of the Western ghats, was on a winding mountain road. As we sped through that desert highway, I remembered my first trip in this part of India, forty years ago.

There was barely a road then. The monsoons had failed three years in a row, and a hot wind blew dust in sheets through the air. The shared taxi I had taken had no air conditioning, and the window had to be rolled down all through the long and bumpy journey. We passed through villages which were completely deserted. Farming was hard here, and three successive years without rains had pushed families into starvation. Whole villages had walked away to find livelihoods in cities. Now systems of dams and canals brought water into this region, and the air itself was more moist. There was still dust, but not the fine curtain of dust that waved in the air. I could see stands of babul, the native thorn acacia (Vachellia nilotica) , growing even on exposed ridges, with stands of prosopsis, the invasive Neltuma juliflora, sprouting in thickets.

About an hour from Udaipur we had entered the range of smaller villages and census towns, But even here on the road we would pass little families returning from a shopping expedition. The degree of prosperity is unimaginably higher than it was forty years ago. About a third of India’s population has an income which allows them to make discretionary purchases. Development becomes a bad word when it begins to put more and more money into a smaller number of pockets. This place has gone through human development sometime in the last decades, and it is obvious in the bettered lives of many people. I wonder when we will become a middle class country. When at least half of the rest of the population enters the middle class?