Born to Explore

I am always intrigued by the idea of how nature works, how imperfect its geological records are, what causes these imperfections, and how we can resolve them. In a way, a Geologist is a story teller, piecing together imperfect details dwindling in the time-spectrum and make logical conjectures about what might have caused them. This is fun, fascinating, full of imagination, and challenging. The aim is to reconstruct the puzzle one by one to accept/reject/modify the story that has already been proposed before in one form or another. Sometimes we are too greedy to stare at a rock or foolish enough to climb an icefall just to collect a bag of sediments, but this is all part of a grand endeavor. You are now going to explore a tiny part of that story making.

Throughout my scientific career, I have had the opportunity to conduct research in the Himalaya, especially in the Indian part of Central and northwestern Himalaya and in the Eastern Nepal Himalaya. These high-altitude dynamic mountain ranges offer one of the best natural laboratories to study the role of climate and tectonic forcing in modulating surface processes and Quaternary landscape evolution. I have conducted extensive field research in this active orogen for over 8 years and have gained wide-ranging knowledge about the tectonics and geomorphological processes and Quaternary sedimentary characteristics of the key landforms like, moraines, debris and alluvial fans, landslides, and subglacial streamlined-landforms. These landforms are also used extensively for geochronological reconstructions and for constraining fault slip-rates. The spatial resolution of my research, however, varies from micro-scale landform analysis (during my MPhil.) to the entire orogen (during my Ph.D.). My research mostly consists of detailed (digital and analog) geomorphic and geologic field mapping aided by remote sensing and GIS, identifying most suitable areas and materials for optically stimulated luminescence (OSL), radiocarbon, and terrestrial cosmogenic nuclides (TCN) dating, cross-calibrating geomorphic information with detailed micro-scale Quaternary sedimentological and facies analyses along exposures and/or trenches, and validating the field interpretation with numerical ages, statistical, and quantitative modelling.