KARACHI: KU begins study on changes in Indus delta
By Our Staff Reporter
KARACHI, March 30: A study is being conducted to find out major sources of sedimentation and its composition, being brought into the Arabian Sea through the Indus river, said a scientist.
This was stated by Dr Peter Clift, who is associated with Wood Hole Oceanographic Institution (USA), at a lecture on Sedimentary Evolution of Indus River System and Future Marine Research Programmes, at the Karachi University on Tuesday.
He said that the findings of the $200,000, three-year (2004 - 2007) study, which is being sponsored by the US National Science Foundation, would benefit petroleum industry, coastal and fishing communities as the results would reveal changes, and the probable reasons for the changes, in the coastline and their effects on fishing and other marine resources.
He said that the data on the Indus delta and related marine area that receives sediments being brought in by the river would also be helpful to the oil industry.
It is also referred to as the Indus Fan and is one of the biggest and probably the richest in resources, but required more research. He said the study would also try to find out the reasons for decrease and increase in the amount of sediment that the river carries along with its flow and particularly during the monsoons.
He said that the Indus River, which is an ancient river and is over 50 million years old, passes through various mountain ranges that were created owing to impact of the sub-continental plate pushing into to the Asian continental plate.
He said that bulk of the sediment load that the Indus carries comes from the Korakoram mountain range, as against other major rivers emptying in the Bay of Bengal, which carry bulk of their sediment load from the Himalayas. He said that many wells on main land as well as in the deep sea would be dug to get samples to find out the origin of the sediments and the resources and data could be used for further scientific studies as well.
He said that the study is an attempt to understand the geological evolution of the Indus delta. Karachi University, National Institute of Oceanography, Geological Survey of Pakistan etc would also be collaborating in the study.
He said that Indus Fan is one of the largest sediment bodies in the modern oceans and is recording the history of continental erosion during the upliftment of Himalayas and strengthening of the monsoons.
He said that the erosion related record of the Arabian Sea is at the centre of debates concerning the nature of continent - ocean interactions and how climate, tectonic activity and erosion inter-relate.
He said the during the study local experts and he himself and his US colleague Liviu Giosan would be characterizing the sediment in the river, delta, shelf, submarine canyon and deep sea fan in order to constrain sediment distribution pathways and thus test these competing hypothesis for sediment flux.
He said that one of the basic questions that could be answered when the results of the study came would be that whether sediment was being fed straight from the river into the Indus canyon and to the deep sea fan despite the Holocene sea level rise, as had been proposed for the Bengal Fan, or if sediment is all being trapped in the delta or re-worked westward along the coast by the current wave activity.
He said that the experts would also assess the consequences that the geo-engineering-scale experiment of damming the Indus have had on the deltaic sedimentation during the last decades.
Shoreline changes along the Indus coastline and bathymetric changes on the sub aqueous delta during the 150 years would be quantified using a series of early charts of the region. Littoral processes in dispersing sediment along the front of the Indus Delta would also be assessed.
Karachi University vice chancellor Dr Pirzada Qasim said that though the country has over a 1,000-kilometre long coastline, very little research has been carried out in the field of marine resources. He said that very limited marine related data was available.
He hoped that the students and local scientists would benefit from this extensive study project as not only they would be using modern techniques and research tools but would also have a long interaction with foreign scientists.
Dr Iqbal Mohsin, Shamim A. Shaikh, Dr Athar A. Khan and others also spoke at the lecture, that was organized jointly by the Karachi University and the Pakistan Association of Petroleum Geoscientists (PAGP).
