Geophysical Phenomena

Impact of Cyclones on Coastal and Inland Regions

Cyclones basically originate over the warm ocean waters and are normally associated with coastal destruction by means of storm surges and heavy rains brought about by strong winds. However, they do affect inland regions too, albeit through a series of indirect and secondary effects:

1. Flooding and Landslides: Cyclones moving into the interior lose wind energy but often unleash torrents of rain, leading to riverine and flash floods. This tends easily to cause an overflow of rivers and reservoirs and floods inland urban and agricultural regions away from the coastal areas. In the high grounds, these rains cause landslides which augment the risks to both lives and property.

2. Disturbance of Basic Amenities: Regular power supply was interrupted; Telecoms, water and a number of transport networks were also rendered non-operational in many regions of the country due to the cyclones. The rural areas normally do not have resistant infrastructure; therefore, outages last for a long time and the delay leads to prolongation of suffering of human beings as well as economic losses.

3. Agricultural Losses: Inland agricultural belts are exposed to strong winds and heavy rains that lead to crop and livestock losses, soil erosion, flooding, and direct damage to farmlands. Thus, it impacts food security, livelihood and the rural economy, especially in the peasants’, agricultural based economy.

4. Economic Impacts and Migration: They influence the unfavorable effects that are manifested in supply chain disruption and damaged infrastructure slow down the pace of economic activities in inland regions. In extreme cases, displacement of populations in affected areas can add to the stress in the urban centers as people move for shelter and to seek employment.

India’s Readiness to Natural Hazards

The NDMA and State Disaster Management Authorities have provided frameworks that have helped India prepare and prevent disaster for quite a while now, especially along the coasts with advance warning systems and evacuation plans, as well as shelters for cyclones. Inland places are nowhere close to being prepared though, as the issue lies in alerting populations in rural inland areas, that are left unaware and without resources to prepare. Inland infrastructure such as power, road connectivity, and water supply usually is not cyclone-resistant. The heavy storms disrupt the power supplies, road connectivity, and water supply systems usually which tend to get severely disrupted when heavy storms occur.

-Community Awareness and Training: Inland area disaster preparedness training and awareness programs are only conducted for vulnerable groups like farmers and rural communities, who also have very little knowledge of cyclone impacts.
Recap India has progressed in terms of preparedness for cyclones but has much-needed improvements inside in inland disaster response systems, infrastructure resilience, and community awareness before ensuring much broader national preparedness.

The geosyncline model postulated by German geologist Leopold Kober in 1921 is summarized below:

It should be mentioned that Kober, unlike one of his contemporaries Suess who focused the attention to tectonic forces, believed that geosynclines are the extensive elongated depositional troughs, which are very long in the process of sinking through earth’s crust as extended periods of geological time are concerned. They are bordered by comparably stable continental crust blocks. They are bounded by relatively stable continental lithosphere domains.

Thick sequences of sediments eroded from adjacent land areas are formed as the geosyncline progressively deepens. The greatest thickness of sediment is deposited in the geosynclinical region reaching its central part.
Finally, the load of the overlying sedimentary rocks precipitates the geosyncline down into the asthenosphere (the plastic layer beneath the earth’s crust). This begins the mountain making processes by folding and faulting of the subsequent layers of sedimentary rocks.

General subsidence creates a condition favorable for the accumulation of further, superimposed layers of sediment on deformed strata. Therefore, such cycles as sedimentation subsidence and deformation can cover hundreds of millions of years.

Finally, if ground conditions are suitable, the geosyncline might be squeezed, folded, and uplifted in the mountainous belt. These latter ones are part of continental crust which was initially evolved from seabed sediments. The first ones can also be at deep rock that has been eroded.

Kober regarded the Geosyncline idea as an explanation for sedimentary and tectonic history of many mountain systems and plates. Information about his contributor may be reported in historical context of the early twentieth century geology preceding the theory of plates.

Thus, Kober’s geosyncline model was long trending basins wherein very thick marine sediments had prograded and these were afterward folded and uplifted into mountain chains through subsidence and crust shortening processes spanning large periods of time.