Looking at Ladakh: Part 1

During the summer last year, myself and a fellow UCL student travelled to Ladakh in India with the NGO Geology for Global Development (GfGD). The purpose of this trip was to teach local school children about Geology, and to attend an academic conference held by scientists from around the world. One of the main focuses of the conference was on natural hazards, which highlights the importance of the topic in current geological circles; especially in Ladakh itself.

Dry, loose material covering slopes in Ladakh. Source: mouthshut.com

The region of Ladakh is part of the state of Jammu and Kashmir, which sits high in the Himalaya on a 3000m high plateau. It is vulnerable to a variety of hazards; drought, floods, mass movement and owing to its position on the Karakoram fault-plane (Rutter et al., 2007) - earthquakes. One of the largest natural disasters in Ladakh happened only a few years previously, in August 2010. After heavy overnight rains and a cloudburst event, the region was hit by an intense flood. It triggered a chain of secondary hazards, such as mudslides and debris flows (Hodgkins, 2013), resulting in the death of an estimated 234 people (Gupta et al., 2012). Due to the dry climate of Ladakh through most of the year, slope material is made of loose, unconsolidated material with little vegetation covering the slopes. This means that when a heavy rainfall event does occur, the runoff generated is huge, while the slopes are incredibly unstable and therefore prone to mass movement.

Cleaning up the effects of a debris flow after the 2010 cloudburst event. Source: climatechangenews.asia

At the school, the damage of the cloudburst event still seemed in the forefront of many students minds. Just after we left, another set of heavy rainfall triggered a further disaster near the city of Srinagar, close to Ladakh in Jammu and Kashmir. There is worrying evidence, however, that the frequency of these disasters is set to increase due to anthropogenic change. Firstly, as population pressures increase, many people look for cheap land to build their houses on - the cheapest being upon the unstable slopes of the region (Nagle, 1998). This issue became particularly poignant, when after teaching a session on the hazards of building on unstable slopes, many students approached us worried about the stability of their own houses, and the downwards pressure these structures would have on the slopes... For now, I will end my blog post on Ladakh, but stay tuned for part 2 where I will be looking at further anthropogenic issues and mitigation efforts! See you soon!