Union Human Resource and Development (HRD) Minister Kapil Sibal on 10.09.2010 said the Indian Institute of Technology (IITs) across the country will soon introduce new courses in medicine and even enroll foreign students as well as recruit foreign faculties at the post graduate level.

“The government has decided to seek the approval of the Medical Council of India (MCI) for the course. The IIT council meeting decided to carry out appropriate amendment in the Institute of Technologies Act to enable the IITs to offer the medicine programme,” said Sibal.

“We are making sure that wherever the instruction leads to a degree relating to any branch of medicine, then of course clearances from Medical Council of India under the Act will have to be taken,” he added.

Sibal said the council has also decided to enable IITs to recruit foreign faculties, which should not be more than 10 per cent of the total faculty strength.

“In principle, we agreed that IITs are entitled to recruiting foreign faculties. A mechanism will be set up with the help of the Home Ministry to ensure that there is no hiccup in the process and there is easy exit and entry of people,” he added, after a meeting of the IIT council.

Crack IIT entrance with 12th marks, aptitude test

Excellent chance has come to the IIT aspiring students, who struggle a lot to crack IIT entrance. Just get good marks and give aptitude test, you will get through IIT entrance soon.

Kapil Sibal, the Union Minister of Human Resource Development, announced major changes in the process of getting admission in Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) and other engineering colleges. Class 12 marks along with an aptitude test would decide admissions into IITs, informed Sibal.

However, he also stated that modalities were still being worked out to make the changes in the admission process and no timeframe has been set for implementing the new proposals.

The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) entrance exams needs an overhaul to discourage coaching institutes, Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal said on 10.09.2010. “The present system of coaching must go as it is detrimental to the quality of intake,” Sibal told reporters after a meeting of the council of IITs. The changes in the pattern of engineering entrance exams had been proposed by the ministry earlier as well.

A committee was formed under IIT Kharagpur director Damodar Acharya which suggested including weightage of the 12th Class result and a national level aptitude test for admission in engineering courses.

“The Acharya committee has given its report and it was widely agreed that the entrance exam system needs to be changed but it is yet to finalize how,” Sibal said.

Though a consensus could not be built on the recommendations of the Acharya report, Sibal said all members agreed on the need for a change. “There are two things. Firstly, the present system of coaching must go as it is detrimental to quality of intake; secondly, the problem of children appearing for multiple entrance exams causes financial and psychological pressure on the children and their family,” Sibal said.

The minister said there were suggestions that state-wise percentile given to students will be considered for the entrance. “We should look at the 12th level performance… otherwise students from some states may get left out,” he said.

“Weightage will be given to 12th exam marks, and that marks will be based on the performance through the year. It will automatically discourage coaching,” he said.

The minister said a committee has been formed under Science and Technology Secretary T. Ramasami and it will submit its report in three months. “After that we’ll involve all IITs and have a full discussion,” he said.

Sibal added that the IITs have said they wanted to continue with the joint entrance exam. ”The IITs don’t want to do away with the JEE but they have said that if an alternative is provided they will discuss it with their faculty,” he added.

Dream Dare Win

www.jeywin.com

*****

Shanthi Rajagopal

As India and Pakistan move towards the welcome resumption of dialogue, New Delhi needs to factor in a new reality: More than Kashmir, it is the accusation that India is stealing water that is rapidly becoming the “core issue” in the Pakistani establishment’s narrative about bilateral problems.

Concern is growing in Pakistan that India is pursuing policies in an attempt to strangulate Pakistan by exercising control over the water flow of Pakistan’s rivers. The concern is most related to Pakistan’s agricultural sector, which would be greatly affected by the building of dams and by the external control of the waters of several rivers that flow into Pakistan. The issue has a layered complexity, as three of the rivers flow into Pakistan through the Indian portion of Jammu & Kashmir, the territory over which the two countries have waged multiple wars.

A group of more than 20 different UN bodies warned earlier this month that the world may be perilously close to its first water war. “Water is linked to the crises of climate change, energy and food supplies and prices, and troubled financial markets,” said the report. “Unless their links with water are addressed and water crises around the world are resolved, these other crises may intensify and local water crises may worsen, converging into a global water crisis and leading to political insecurity and conflict at various levels.”

With the per capita availability of water declining in Pakistan due to rising population and poor water management, there is a sense of an imminent water crisis. The problems are plenty-

• Groundwater is said to be under stress through over-exploitation
• River flows are reported to be diminishing
• Some rivers to be so polluted as to be no more than sewers
• Water supply in cities is reportedly intermittent and unreliable

In most years, the Indus barely makes it beyond the Kotri barrage in Sindh, leading to the ingress of sea water, the increase in soil salinity and the destruction of agriculture in deltaic districts like Thatta and Badin.

While this appears to be an internal problem in Pakistan, the popular refrain in the country seems to be that India is behind the problem. This is being echoed in the media, picked up by the jihadists, and acquiesced in at the official and expert levels through silence (or even aggravated by official statements). This is a new development. Until recently, there were criticisms of particular Indian projects on the western rivers as not compliant with the Treaty, but no accusations of ‘water theft’ by India.

Though Pakistan’s water woes predate recent hydroelectric projects like Baglihar in Jammu and Kashmir, jihadi organisations like the Lashkar-e-Taiba/Jamaat-ud-Dawa have started blaming India for the growing shortage of water. Apart from inflaming public opinion against India, this propaganda helps to blunt the resentment Sindh and Balochistan have traditionally had — as the lowest riparians in the Indus river basin — against West Punjab for drawing more than its fair share of the water flowing through the provinces.

Pakistan blames India, saying it is withholding millions of cubic feet of water upstream on the Chenab in Indian-administered Kashmir and storing it in the massive Baglihar dam in order to produce hydro-electricity. Its Indian neighbour, Pakistan declares, is in breach of a 1960 treaty designed to administer water use in the region. After initial talks to try and resolve the issue, the matter has been put on hold since the Mumbai attacks last November in which 165 people were killed, fuelling tensions between the two quarrelsome neighbours.

How did this accusation come about? The answer is that some studies reportedly indicate a reduction in the flows in the western rivers, and it seems to be readily assumed that if the flows show a reduction, the upper riparian must have reduced them. India would say that if there are reductions in flows, they cannot forthwith be attributed to Indian action.

Also, Pakistan continues to be uncomfortable about Indian projects on the western rivers despite the many stringent safeguards provided by the Treaty to protect Pakistan against certain perceived dangers. Pakistan wants the Treaty to give the exclusive use of the western rivers with no provision whatever for even limited use by India; but such a Treaty might not have been signed by India. But, what with the permissive and restrictive provisions in the Treaty, and the density of technical detail in it, the situation in the Permanent Indus Commission (PIC) has turned adverse, leading to a constant tug of war, instead of constructive cooperation.

Also Pakistan is worried about the number of projects that India is planning on the western rivers. This is because, even with strict compliance with the provisions of the Treaty in each case, India might, taking all the projects together, acquire a measure of control over the waters of the western rivers and might potentially be able to inflict harm on Pakistan.

Pakistan believes that India might be planning a hundred projects. There seems to be no basis for that number. It is more likely that India might have in mind some thirty projects or so. It is not clear whether all those projects will in fact be undertaken, but assuming that they are, it is necessary to consider whether all of them will together give India a greater degree of control; enable large storage; make it possible for India to withhold water from Pakistan, or release stored waters and flood Pakistan. India claims that most of these will be small projects, which are run-of-the-river projects. Given the restrictive provisions of the Treaty, there is hardly any scope either for the retention of waters to the detriment of the lower riparian or for flooding the lower riparian; and that assuming that India wants to harm Pakistan it can do so only by openly violating the Treaty and by first harming itself, its own people, and its own projects (built at great cost).

Islamabad should also not doubt India’s plan to put up projects that do not impede water flows on the western rivers, because Article III of the IWT allows it the use of western river waters for domestic, non-consumptive and agriculture purposes, besides the generation of electricity.

Though the treaty has a mechanism to ensure compliance with the stipulated partitioning of rivers, a major weakness from Pakistan’s standpoint is that it does not compel or require India to do anything on its side for the optimum development of what is, after all, an integrated water system. Inflows to Pakistan depend not just on rainfall and snowmelt in India and China (the uppermost eastern riparian) but also on the health of tributaries, streams, nullahs and acquifers as well as groundwater, soil and forest management practices. This is a classic externality problem. Costs incurred by the upper riparian on responsible watershed management will produce disproportionate benefits for the lower riparian, hence they are not incurred.

Under the treaty, India is allowed to store 3.6 million acreage feet (MAF) of water of the western rivers, but it has not built any such facility so far, allowing unimpeded flows into Pakistan. Since the water level in the Chenab varies wildly during winter and summer, a better strategy would be for both countries to build a joint storage project which would serve the farmers of both countries during the lean periods, some experts aver.

Pakistan might consider the following two points as harmful.

• The initial filling of the Baglihar reservoir, and
• The planned diversion of Kishenganga waters

The first was a very minor and relatively innocuous matter which was blown up into a huge controversy. The issue has been closed at the last meeting of the PIC. The Kishenganga diversion, which Pakistan considers to be a violation of the Treaty and India holds to be specifically permitted by the Treaty, is going to the Court of Arbitration.

The fact that river flows from India to Pakistan have slowly declined is borne out by data on both sides. Above Merala on the Chenab, for example, the average monthly flows for September have nearly halved between 1999 and 2009. India claims that this is because of reduced rainfall and snowmelt. Pakistan refutes, preferring to link observable reductions in flows to hydroelectric projects on the Indian side. That is why, in the run-up to the February 25 meeting of the Indian and Pakistani Foreign Secretaries, Islamabad has gone out of its way to project water as the most important topic it intends to raise.

The reality of the partition

Though inter-provincial disputes over water sharing were a fact of life in this region before 1947, the partition of the subcontinent introduced a further complexity. It was easy for Radcliffe to draw a line on a map and divide up the land of British India but people and water were harder to partition. The rupture to the region’s hydrological system proved to be traumatic. The rivers which irrigated the new nation all had their origins in India. But as an upper riparian locked in a politically adversarial relationship with Pakistan, the Indian side had little or no incentive to look at the Indus basin as an integrated water system. The early years of independence saw bitter disputes as India treated the waters of the Indus’s five tributaries — Jhelum, Chenab, Ravi, Beas and Sutlej — as its own. Geography and terrain meant the Indus itself could not be harnessed on the Indian side of Jammu and Kashmir but intermittent, small-scale, diversions on the tributaries generated considerable tension with Pakistan. In 1960, the two countries sought to put an end to this tension by signing the Indus Water Treaty (IWT) with the World Bank’s mediation.

The IWT partitioned the six rivers of the Indus watershed on a crudely longitudinal basis. India was given exclusive use of the waters of the three eastern tributaries, the Ravi, Beas and Sutlej, and the right to “non-consumptive” use of the western rivers, namely the Indus, Jhelum and Chenab. Under the IWT, India renounced its right to block or divert the flows of the ‘western’ rivers and agreed to confine itself to run-of-the-river hydroelectric projects and the drawing of irrigation water for a specified acreage of farm land. This partitioning was irrational from an ecological standpoint and led to both sides incurring considerable expense as they were forced to develop canal infrastructure drawing on “their” allocated rivers to compensate for the non-use of the other side’s rivers despite that water flowing through their own territory.

Pakistani officials keep accusing India of violating the 1960 treaty on the division of the Indus waters. The Indian side, of course, denies this, and there is, in any case, a system of international mediation built into the IWT for binding international arbitration if the two countries cannot resolve a water-related dispute. Pakistan invoked this mechanism for Baglihar in 2005, though the arbitrator ruled in favour of the project subject to certain modifications. An earlier dispute over the Salal project was resolved in the 1970s by the two Foreign Secretaries.

Many of the disputes that seem to be driven by fears of water scarcity are actually a reflection of another kind of scarcity: electricity. Pakistan opposes the Indian Kishenganga hydel project on the Jhelum, for example, because it will interfere with its proposed Neelum-Jhelum power plant. But if the two countries could build trust in one another, there is no reason why they cannot agree on energy swaps that could do away with the need to duplicate power projects, especially those which restrict the flow of water. Today, given the way terrorism has eroded the Indian political system’s capacity and willingness to do business with Pakistan, such ideas seem hopelessly utopian. But they do offer a glimpse of the kind of future that might be possible should the terrorist menace end. Rather than refusing to talk water, India should show Pakistan how the keys to ending its aquatic insecurities lie in its own hands.

In fact, Islamabad’s desire to bring the water issue on the table on the eve of this week’s foreign secretary talks is a change from its stand in 2002, when the “Pakistan Water Sector Strategy” argued for thwarting any “attempt by India” to scrap the treaty. It anticipated an adverse impact on the river water flows if the treaty was scrapped and argued for building storage capacities to meet requirements in times of shortages, which Pakistan has failed to do adequately.

Silting at dams

Pakistan’s problems are compounded by silting at the Tarbela and Mangla dams, with an internal official assessment admitting that it has lost 32 per cent of its storage capacity due to the problem.

While framing the IWT, the irrigable area of India and Pakistan was assessed at 26 million acres and 39 million acres respectively, while the waters available to them are 32.8 MAF and 135.6 MAF respectively. This means that only about 1.26 feet of water is available to India for its agriculture on eastern rivers, while about 3.5 feet of water is available to Pakistan for its agriculture.

Unused water

Pakistan has a large surplus of unused water. Its documents show about 30 MAF as “available surplus” with a very high escapage to the sea. Pakistan’s irrigation efficiency is also understood to be low, at an estimated 40 per cent. Virtually all of the municipal and industrial wastewater is returned to the rivers, nullahs and streams untreated, which results in deterioration of water quality.

The Pakistan document also suggests that canal capacities are not sufficient to provide the share of each province as per their allocation. The inefficient system aggravates the problems.

As a result of the IWT, Pakistan was assisted by India financially (£62.06 million) and by the IBRD fund to build replacement works, including link canals for transferring waters of the western rivers to eastern rivers. This network of link canals could be used by Pakistan to properly distribute the water.

Pakistan believes that the diversion of Neelum waters is not allowed under the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty, as it will cause a 27 per cent water deficit, when the project is completed. The reduced water flow in the Neelum would not yield the required results of the proposed 1.6 billion dollars Neelum-Jehlum hydropower project that has been designed to generate 969 MW of electricity. It said that India has almost completed a 22-kilometre long tunnel to divert Kishanganga waters to Wullar Lake in Jammu and Kashmir.

President Obama’s Special Envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke has said Washington is in consultations with India and Pakistan to help both countries resolve water disputes between them.

In an interview with a private television channel, Holbrooke termed Pakistan’s water crisis as the second most worry for that country after its sagging economy. “Pakistan’s water crisis is the second most dangerous crisis after its economic turmoil,” The Daily Times quoted Holbrooke, as saying.

The Indus Waters Treaty (IWT), inked between India and Pakistan in 1960, provides appointment of a neutral expert by the World Bank as a last option to resolve water related issues between both the countries.

Unless both countries can arrive at a compromise where the dispute is concerned, analysts fear that this problem might lead to a terrible Indo – Pakistan war.

*****

Vignesh Kumar

The poorest State in India with an official estimate of 39.9 per cent of people living below the poverty line, yet Orissa stands proudly at the second position after Gujarat where proposed investment is concerned. According to Assocham Investment Meter, recorded investment proposals in Orissa reached Rs. 2,00,846 crore (roughly 40 billion USD) in 2009. The cause is the availability of rich mineral resources such as coal and iron ore along with cheap availability of manpower. Steel and power were among the sectors which attracted maximum proposed investments in the state. This was in fact the basis for the commencement of the Posco Project in Orissa which today is creating a huge controversy.

History of the Posco Project

23 June, 2005

On 23/06/2005, the global steel giant POSCO signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Government of Orissa in Bhubaneswar for the construction of a steel plant as well as development of iron ore mines in the state. This was the first step towards the construction of a steel plant in Orissa. The MoU was signed by Mr. Soung-Sik Cho, Executive Vice President of POSCO and Mr. Bhaskar Chatterjee, Principal Secretary of the Government of Orissa, with the participation of Mr. Ku-Taek Lee, Chairman and CEO of POSCO and Mr. Naveen Patnaik, Chief Minister of Orissa.

According to the MoU, POSCO will build a 3 million tonne capacity steel plant, blast furnace or Finex route, during the first phase in Paradeep, Orissa between 2007 and 2010 and expand the final production volume to 12 million tonnes. The investment proposed was to the tune of US$12 billion, including an initial investment of US$ 3 billion during the first phase.

The Government of Orissa was supposed to grant POSCO mining lease rights for 30 years that would ensure an adequate supply of 600 million tonnes of iron ore to POSCO. This in turn will ensure the competitive operations of the POSCO India steel plant. The government will also promote the construction plan for railways, roads, industrial water and electricity keeping up with the steelwork construction plan of POSCO.

The key factors that have been taken into account by POSCO for entering India include the highest projected growth rates over 2006-2020, the skilled workforce and abundant natural resources, especially of iron ore, coal and chrome. The Indian governments progressive policies have also helped ease regulations to set up such projects.

India would derive significant benefits from the project once it is functional, including job creation of 48,000 jobs in the region and 467,000 man years of employment during the construction phase. Foreign exchange inflows of US$23 billion were projected, with taxes and royalty incomes of US$20.3 billion for the central government and US$5.1 billion for the Orissa government.

POSCO’s Indian steel plant project is a significant part of the company’s strategy to enhance its global competitiveness and was seen as a mutual win-win initiative for both the parties involved.

Origin of Posco

Founded in 1968 and headquartered in the southeastern port city of Pohang, POSCO operates two of the world’s premier steel works–the Pohang and Gwangyang works. The Pohang works produces crude steel of 13 million tonnes and specializes in small-lot production of a broad range of products, including hot-rolled coil and cold-rolled sheet, plate, wire rod, electrical steel, and stainless steel. The Gwangyang works focuses on mass-production of limited high-demand products such as hot and cold rolled sheet and produces crude steel of 17 million tonnes. POSCO’s products are shipped to over 60 countries around the globe, satisfying some of the world’s most quality-sensitive customers.

POSCO project

The $12 billion Pohang Iron and Steel Company (POSCO) project in Orissa is the largest foreign investment project ever in India. This project has three components:

• Captive iron ore mines in three areas of Keonjhar District and Sundargarh District.
• Mining lease on 6204 Hectares in Sundargarh District recommended to be approved by the Supreme Court.
• Steel plant: in Jagatsinghpur District, coastal area. Private port: at the mouth of the river Jatadhari, close to steel plant area; the MoU only makes reference to the possibility of a “minor port” being created.

POSCO needs some 4004 acres, of which but ten percent belong to the cultivators. The rest of the land required belongs to the government, and this has been recorded as “under forest” in official documentation. Government records do not show that the vast majority of this land has been under cultivation by the people living in these areas for generations

A field study in Orissa made found that during the land survey and settlement operation carried out in the late 1950s and continuing in the 1980s in some areas of Koraput district, hardly one per cent land in actual possession of the tribal communities was recorded in their favour.

Tribal cultivators are then termed “encroachers”, and their eviction from mineral rich forest and hill tracts follows “legally”. Much lauded statutory provisions that purport to give protection to indigenous forest dwellers are ignored (“interpreted”) by the relevant ministries to achieve the same result.

POSCO has delinked the mining project from the plant construction in order to get the vast project underway. A license for over 2,500 hectares for the proposed Khandadhar iron ore mines has been recommended by the Orissa State government, despite opposition from other companies and locals. But existing iron ore mining in the region has already severely impacted the water resources of a large region inhabited by many thousands. In the immediate region of the proposed mines the only constant water source are waterfalls that are already contaminated from iron mining with the result that the water is now not safe for drinking. In the larger surrounding region the Central Underground Water Board has reported that the underground water level in Joda and Barbil river areas has subsided by four metres, that forty percent of the region’s 8,000 tube wells no longer function, and that nearly half of the irrigated land can no longer rely on water from the Khandadhar waterfalls.

The POSCO project as a whole requires an immense impact on one of the last forested areas remaining in central India. Particular concern has been voiced over the State government’s commitment to “facilitate” the provision to POSCO of 7,000 crore liters of water per year for the plant alone from the very limited water resources of the draught ridden state.

But POSCO is not having a smooth run. The anti-POSCO movement is gearing up again against land acquisition. The POSCO struggle has now acquired strategic importance for other industries and corporate groups that face public agitation for destroying forests. This has added an extra dimension to anti-POSCO movement; caging the aspirations of agitators to basic minimum such as maintenance of status-quo or better compensation.

POSCO has not been able to initiate any project-related work on the ground. The forest clearance for POSCO was granted in December 2009. The Scheduled Tribes and Other Forest-Dwellers Recognition of Forest Rights Act, 2006 (henceforth, FRA) provides for settlement of rights by recognising the right of forest-dwellers to occupy, cultivate, use and protect areas within which they were residing before 13 December 2005. The rules for the Act were notified in January 2008. So, the forest clearance for the project could not have been granted till this process of filing claims and conferring rights was initiated and completed.

Since 30 July 2009, there has also been a circular of the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) in operation which also seeks the above, not just for POSCO but for all projects coming up before the MoEF for forest clearance, which states that the State/UT Governments, where process of settlement of Rights under the FRA is yet to begin, are required to enclose evidences supporting that settlement of rights under FRA 2006 will be initiated and completed before the final approval for proposals..

Nonetheless, within five months, the forest clearance for POSCO was granted without the FRA process in the area being complete. As compensation, the clearance letter included a condition that the processes under the FRA would need to be completed before the clearance became effective.

This and many other violations were brought to the attention of Jairam Ramesh, Minister of Environment and Forests (MoEF). The ministry responded by issuing another note on 8 January 2010 reiterating the condition stipulated in the forest clearance, which says that the rights of the tribal people will need to be settled, prior to the forest clearance being in operation.

The MoU stands expired on 22 June 2010. But the MoU has a clause which states that “no such extension shall be considered unless the Company has made substantial progress on implementation of the project in terms of construction, erection of plant and machinery and investment at site to the satisfaction of the State Government in these five years in implementing the first phase as envisaged in this MoU.”

According to the same document the first phase should have meant that 6 MT production of steel should have been commissioned, which has not happened. By the terms of the MoU, therefore, the absence of progress would imply that the MoU cannot be extended.

For the local opposition to the POSCO project, all these are legalese that will iron themselves out along the way. What matters crucially is that the people resisting remain united in thought and action. Despite differences and tension on the ground, the fact remains that POSCO has not been able to start work on its project for five years.

July 28^th 2010

Shrugging off mounting opposition from the local people and objections from the Joint Committee under the Ministry of Environment and Forests, which is overseeing the implementation of the Forest Right Act (FRA), the Orissa government began the land acquisition process for the proposed Posco-India steel project in Jagatsinghpur district.

Revenue officials, flanked by a horde of police personnel, made the first real attempt to acquire land five years after the State government inked a Memorandum of Understanding with South Korean steel major Posco.

The locations of betel vines were documented using the Global Positioning System; the vines were subsequently removed in the presence of the owner and witnesses and the place was demarcated as ‘acquired.’ The administration paid Rs.1.15 lakh to the displaced person.

But the Orissa government halted the land acquisition process overnight for Posco’s Rs51,000 crore mega steel project near here after facing stiff opposition from villagers. Though the administration carried out land acquisition work and paid compensation to two betel leaf cultivators, the official team was prevented from entering Gada Kujang in the proposed project area as villagers blocked the main link road.

State agriculture minister Damodar Rout and Ersama-Balikuda MLA Prashant Kumar Muduli, along with the district collector, had rushed to Gada Kujung to speak to villagers.

They held a marathon meeting with the representatives of the pro-project United Action Committee (UAC) for facilitating the land acquisition process. UAC, the BJD-backed local body supporting the Posco project, is resisting land acquisition by the administration for not informing villagers.

Civil rights groups have accused the state government of knowingly violating norms under Forest Rights Acts and sought the intervention of Orissa high court chief justice.

CPI-backed Posco Pratirodh Sangram Samiti (PPSS) is opposing land acquisition for the project.

Aug 03, 2010

Indian metals major Ve­danta Aluminum and Korean steel behemoth Posco fe­ar that their multi-billion pr­ojects may face inordinate delays after environm­ent minister Jairam Ram­e­sh told policymakers in Pa­r­liament on Aug 2^nd 2010 that bo­th firms violated forest laws. Ramesh also maintained that the two companies were under investigation in Orissa for violations.

Chief conservator of forests JK Tiwari’s inspection report of August 16, 2009, clarified that there was no violation of law. The report also stated that there were no environmental infringements. A three-member committee set up by environment ministry also concluded on February 11 2010 this year that there “was no mining or construction on the 660.749 hectares of land under question that was allotted to Vedanta”.

Similar was the tone and tenor of Posco officials who refused to accept that the company violated any law. A senior Posco official told Financial Chronicle that the minister was going against his own guidelines. Already, an environment ministry team led by environment activist Ashish Kothari has raised objections about the way clearances were accorded to the Posco project in the state. Yet another panel led by a retired official Meenu Gupta is examining how these alleged infringements had taken place.

Meanwhile, the Jagatsinghpur district administration has submitted its detailed report on socio-economic, forest and horticulture survey of the proposed Posco steel plant conducted in eight villages including the trouble torn Dhinkia village to state government. According to Posco officials, the report backed the company’s claims on the land

The survey teams colle­cted data of betel vines, pra­wn gheris and other immovable assets without identification of beneficiaries. The number and area of prawn gheris, betel vines and other immovable assets have be­en included in this report.

In July 2010, Posco announced a compensation package for the people to be displaced by its Rs 51,000 crore mega steel project. The South Korean steel major would pay Rs 17 lakh per acre of agriculture land while the price of area under betel vine was fixed at Rs 11.5 lakh per acre.

Aug 4^th 2010

The Orissa government resumed its global positioning system -based resurvey for the proposed Rs 54,000-crore Posco Steel Project near Paradip, following a three-day halt, after the United Action Committee (UAC), a pro-Posco outfit, agreed to lend support. Following state agriculture minister Damodar Rout and local legislator Prasant Muduli’s assurance to UAC members that after discussions with the state government, their demands would be fulfilled within next 10 days, they agreed to cooperate in the exercise.

Stop Posco project, Centre tells Orissa – 5.08.2010

In the latest hurdle to Posco’s embattled Rs.54,000-crore steel project in Orissa, the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests has told the State government to stop all work related to it, including land acquisition and handover, as it is violating the Forest Rights Act (FRA).

The August 5, 2010 order comes in the wake of a report by a committee set up jointly by the Environment and Tribal Affairs Ministries to assess the impact of the Act on sustainable forest resources management. A sub-group of the committee visited Orissa and found that “certain violations related to the Posco project were taking place as well.”

The Environment Ministry’s clearance for diversion of forest land for the project had stipulated that FRA implementation be completed first before any acquisition and handover. The committee found that the FRA process, to give land rights to the original forest dwellers, had still not even gone beyond the initial stages.

The State government has also failed to respond to the July 29, 2010 demand for urgent information on the land handover to Posco. Instead, the district administration seems to be proceeding with land acquisition from consenting families and demolition of paan cultivation, the order said. “The team’s conclusion is that any work related to the project in the area…is a violation of the FRA and of the conditionality laid down by the MoEF in its forest clearance,” the order said.

Dream Dare Win

www.jeywin.com

*****

Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh on 3.07.2010 inaugurated the swanky, world-class Terminal 3 of the Indira Gandhi International Airport in New Delhi, saying it signalled the arrival of new India, committed to join the ranks of modern, industrialised nations of the world. .

Hailing the new terminal as exemplifying India’s resolve to bridge fast enough the infrastructure deficit in the country, Dr. Singh said T3, built in just 37 months at a cost of about Rs. 10,000 crore, has established new global benchmarks.

Yet another reason for satisfaction, the Prime Minister said, was that it “proves the success of the Public-Private Partnership model in execution of large infrastructure project.”

Sprawling over an area of 5.4 million square feet, the new terminal building is said to be the world’s sixth largest. Though spanking new and modern airports in Bangalore and Hyderabad have already been opened, the IGI airport at Delhi dwarfs both of them.

The Prime Minister unveiled a plaque to mark the formal inauguration of the new terminal in the presence of United Progressive Alliance chairperson and Congress president Sonia Gandhi, Civil Aviation Minister Praful Patel, Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit and G.M. Rao, Chairman of the GMR group that led the international consortium which built the terminal. While international operations from T3 will begin from July 14, 2010, domestic operations will start from July 31, 2010.

Dr. Singh said that it was estimated that India’s aviation sector has the potential to absorb up to $120 billion of investment by 2020. Analysts predict that domestic traffic could reach 160 to 180 million and international traffic in excess of 50 million by 2020, he pointed out. “In a span of a few years, India has become the 9th largest aviation market in the world. We now have 10 scheduled airlines operating in our country, compared to two in 1990. In the same period, the scheduled aircraft deployed by the Indian carriers has gone up four times, from 100 to about 400,” the Prime Minister said.

Emphasising the need to create safe, secure efficient and environment friendly systems conducive to healthy growth of civil aviation sector, the Prime Minister said the regulatory and policy framework also needs to be aligned with the needs of the civil aviation industry to encourage serious investment. Towards achieving these goals, he said, the government has strengthened the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) and set up the Airport Economic Regulatory Authority (AERA).

Pointing out that Delhi airport has improved its rank sharply in terms of Air Service Quality (ASQ) performance from 101 in 2007 to 21 in 2010, Dr. Singh expressed the hope that after the opening of T-3 the airport would shortly rank within the first 10 airports of the world.

Terminal 3 (T3) has 78 aerobridges, 168 check-in counters

With all foreign carriers shifting their bases from the existing Terminal 2 to the new, swanky Terminal 3 of the IGI Airport in Delhi on July 14, 2010, the first fully integrated terminal is all set to become operational.

The plush T3 will see Air India’s flight AI-102 docking in straight from New York on July 14, 2010. It will take off from T3 later. The shiny glass and steel structure has 78 aerobridges, more than Singapore’s Changi airport, and 168 check-in counters and is fully equipped to receive the super-jumbo Airbus A-380, world’s largest passenger aircraft.

Spread over 4 km, 80 per cent of T3 is made of glass supported by metal frames. The nine-level terminal building would be used for 90 per cent of the entire passenger movement at the IGI Airport.

Comfortable lounges, nap and shower rooms will add to passenger comfort in the airport which will have a mix of restaurants, bars, cafes and fast food outlets in around 20,000 sq meter of commercial space.

Besides three functional runways catering to T3 terminal, it will have 92 automatic walkways and a multi-level air-conditioned car park to accommodate 4,300 cars, both first in India. There is a 100-room transit hotel and business lounge inside the terminal itself.

Around 800 Flight Information Display Systems have been used for live flight information and 8,000 speakers installed for public address system. Most modern technology has been put to use for check-in process and baggage retrieval at the new terminal, which can handle 12,800 bags in an hour.

Common User Passenger Processing System and an advanced 5 level in-line Baggage Handling System with explosive detection technology would be operational to ensure quicker processing and higher security.

Besides 95 immigration counters, the new terminal boasts of numerous escalators and walkalators, including one claiming to be the longest in Asia at 118 m. About 3000 security cameras have been installed to keep an eye on every nook and corner of the airport premises.

Almost 20,000 square metres of retail area offers duty free stores have been set up by the famous Irish duty-free chain Aer Rianta International. Passengers would get an experience of a huge mall inside the terminal itself with all top brands ranging from Gucci and Versace to L’Oreal and Dior having their outlets selling items ranging from apparel, cosmetics, perfumes, jewellery, watches to tobacco and liquor.

Famous food and beverage brands like Pizza Hut, KFC, Costa Coffee, Copper Chimney, Flavours, Cafe Ritazza and The Food Village are also opening their shops at both domestic and international areas of the terminal building.

T3 will be one of the few green airports in the world, having eco-friendly features like energy-efficient buildings, high-performance air-conditioning, use of municipal waste to generate electricity, rain water harvesting, waste-water treatment and reuse of treated water.

Designed as per the Indian Green Building Council’s rating system, T3 will have a high level of green cover with landscaping of 70 acres outside and 10,000 square metres inside the building.

Numerous varieties of plants, trees and shrubs are being planted. While most of the plants are indigenous, few exotic varieties of orchids have been sourced from Thailand and Mexico. Over 9 lakh plants will provide a green cover for the airport and the landscaping will have a large number of fountains and soothing lighting.

An Emirates Airbus A380 flew in from Dubai with over 500 passengers, marking the world’s largest commercial aircraft’s arrival at the Terminal-3 (T3) of Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport (IGIA) on 15.07.2010.

The Emirates EK516 landed around 3:00 pm on 15.07.2010 in heavy downpour around the airport.

The Airbus A380 flight was part of a drill to reaffirm the operational readiness of the world’s sixth largest passenger terminal.

T3 has a capacity to handle 34 million passengers per annum and will be fully operational from July 28 after the synchronisation process among various airport agencies is complete.

*****

The government of India has proposed special examinations to induct young officers recruited through the State Civil Services into the elite Indian Administrative Service (IAS). Faced with a shortfall of at least 560 IAS officers across India, a proposal for the UPSC to hold “limited competitive examinations” to allow young officers serving in the states to join the IAS is under active consideration of the Prime Minister’s Office.

A similar move to make up the acute shortfall of IPS officers through a “limited competitive examination” for young officers in Central Police Organisations (CPOs), Central Paramilitary Forces (CPFs) and state police forces had been firmed up by the Union ministry for home affairs (MHA) in March, 2010.

The proposal had been struck down by the UPSC, prompting the home ministry to approach the PMO to overrule the UPSC’s decision. The Union home minister, Mr P. Chidambaram, will be meeting the law minister, Mr Veerappa Moily, and the minister of state in the ministry of personnel, Mr Prithviraj Chavan, on Friday to elicit their views. The Union home minister, Mr P. Chidambaram, will be meeting the law minister, Mr Veerappa Moily, and the minister of state in the ministry of personnel, Mr Prithviraj Chavan, on 18.06.2010 to settle contentious issues like age criteria, and other modalities involved in holding such exams. “We will be taking the views of the stakeholders to resolve any complications in view of the concerns expressed by the UPSC. A final view will be taken after we study their suggestions,” an Ministry Home Affairs official said.

*****

Shanthi Rajagopal

April 20th
A deep-water oil drilling rig known as the MODU Deepwater Horizon exploded and caught fire in the Gulf of Mexico on April 20th 2010 with 126 people on board. At least seven people were critically injured in the 10 p.m. blast about 50 miles southeast of Venice and were receiving medical treatment in the New Orleans area and Alabama, according to the Coast Guard. The Deepwater Horizon was a 9-year-old semi-submersible Mobile Offshore Drilling Unit (MODU), a massive floating, dynamically positioned drilling rig built by Hyundai Heavy Industries that could operate in waters up to 8,000 feet (2,400 m) deep and drill down to 30,000 feet
The incident which shook the world during April this year 2010 has been termed as Deepwater Horizon oil spill (also referred to as the BP oil spill, the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, the BP oil disaster or the Macondo blowout.
The gusher, now estimated to be flowing at 35,000 to 60,000 barrels (1,500,000 to 2,500,000 US gallons; 5,600 to 9,500 cubic metres) of crude oil per day, originates from a deepwater wellhead 5,000 feet (1,500 m) below the ocean surface. It has not been possible to ascertain the exact spill flow rate due to the difficulty of installing measurement devices at that depth and is a matter of ongoing debate. The resulting oil slick covers a surface area of at least 2,500 square miles (6,500 km2), with the exact size and location of the slick fluctuating from day to day depending on weather conditions. Scientists have also reported immense underwater plumes of oil not visible at the surface.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said during a White House briefing that designating the spill as one of “national significance” means that “the US can draw down assets from across the country” to assist with cleanup. She said 1,100 people are working on the cleanup effort, which as on that date had collected 685,000 gallons of oil and water from the polluted Gulf. The White House said 174,060 feet of flotation booms had been deployed to corral the floating oil.

The spill will result in an environmental disaster, with extensive impact already on marine and wildlife habitats. It has also damaged the Gulf of Mexico fishing and tourism industries. With a variety of ongoing efforts to stem the flow of oil at the wellhead, crews have been working to protect hundreds of miles of beaches, wetlands and estuaries along the northern Gulf coast, using skimmer ships, floating containment booms, anchored barriers, and sand-filled barricades along shorelines. The U.S. Government has named the British company BP as the responsible party in the incident, and officials have said the company will be held accountable for all cleanup costs resulting from the oil spill. BP is the operator and principal developer of the Macondo Prospect with 65% of interest, while 25% is owned by Anadarko Petroleum Corporation, and 10% by MOEX Offshore 2007, a unit of Mitsui.

The Deep-water Horizon was drilling an exploratory well at a water depth of approximately 5,000 feet (1,500 m) in the Macondo Prospect located in the Mississippi Canyon Block 252, in the United States exclusive economic zone about 41 miles (66 km) off the Louisiana coast in the Gulf of Mexico. It was at this time that the explosion took place. Production casing was being run and cemented by Halliburton Energy Services. It was due to be tested for integrity and a cement plug set to temporarily abandon the well for later completion as a subsea producer.

In their permit to drill the well, BP estimated the worst case flow at 162,000 barrels per day. On April 28, 2010, based on satellite pictures, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimated that the leak was likely 5,000 barrels (210,000 US gallons; 790 cubic metres) a day.

The spread of the oil was initially increased by strong southerly winds caused by an impending cold front. By April 25, the oil spill covered 580 square miles (1,500 km2) and was only 31 miles (50 km) from the ecologically sensitive Chandeleur Islands. An April 30 estimate placed the total spread of the oil at 3,850 square miles. The spill quickly approached the Delta National Wildlife Refuge and Breton National Wildlife Refuge, where dead animals, including a sea turtle, were found.

On May 14, the report said that a publicly available model called the Automated Data Inquiry for Oil Spills indicates about 35 percent of a hypothetical 114,000 barrels (4,800,000 US gal; 18,100 m3) spill of light Louisiana crude oil released in conditions similar to those found in the Gulf now would evaporate, that between 50 and 60 percent of the oil would remain in or on the water, and the rest would be dispersed in the ocean.

By June 4, the oil spill had landed on125 miles (201 km) of Louisiana’s coast, had washed up along Mississippi and Alabama barrier islands, and was found for the first time on a Florida barrier island at Pensacola Beach. On June 9, oil sludge began entering the Intracoastal Waterway through Perdido Pass after floating booms across the opening of the pass failed to stop the oil.

The rig’s blowout preventer, a fail-safe device fitted at source of the well, did not automatically cut off the oil flow as intended when the explosion occurred. BP attempted to use remotely operated underwater vehicles to close the blowout preventer valves on the well head 5,000 feet (1,500 m) below sea level, a valve-closing procedure taking 24–36 hours. BP engineers have attempted a number of techniques to control or stop the oil spill. The first and fastest was to place a 125-tonne (280,000 lb) container dome over the largest of the well leaks and pipe the oil to a storage vessel on the surface. But the effort did not succeed.
BP next tried to shut down the well completely using a technique called “top kill”. The process involves pumping heavy drilling fluids through two 3-inch (7.6 cm) lines into the blowout preventer that sits on top of the wellhead. This would first restrict the flow of oil from the well, which then could be sealed permanently with cement. On May 27, the U.S. Coast Guard, who is coordinating the government response, expressed that engineers had succeeded in stopping the flow of oil and gas into the Gulf of Mexico.

The next contingency option was the Lower Marine Riser Package (LMRP) Cap Containment System. The operational plan first involves cutting and then removing the damaged riser from the top of the failed blowout preventer to leave a cleanly-cut pipe at the top of the BOP’s LMRP. The cap is designed to be connected to a riser from the Discoverer Enterprise drillship and placed over the LMRP with the intention of capturing most of the oil and gas flowing from the well. BP is also working on a system that will allow it to flow oil from the choke and kill valves on the BOP through a subsea manifold to the Q4000 service platform operated by Helix Energy Solutions Group, with processing capacity for about 5,000 barrels (210,000 US gallons; 790 cubic metres) of oil per day. Q4000 will be paired with Sealion Shipping owned well testing vessel Toisa Pisces
Wildlife and environmental groups accused BP of holding back information about the extent and impact of the growing slick, and urged the White House to order a more direct federal government role in the spill response. The spill threatens environmental disaster due to factors such as petroleum toxicity and oxygen depletion. More than 400 species live in the islands and marshlands at risk, including the endangered Kemp’s Ridley turtle. In the national refuges most at risk, about 34,000 birds have been counted, including gulls, pelicans, roseate spoonbills, egrets, terns, and blue herons. As of June 10, dead animals found in the spill zone included 1131 dead birds, 331 sea turtles, 38 dolphins and other mammals, and 1 reptile. There may be other dead animals that go unfound. It is possible the Gulf Stream sea currents may spread the oil into the Atlantic Ocean.

ALABAMA BEACHES
Beaches in Orange Beach, Ala., where large amounts of crude and tar balls washed ashore on Saturday, were mostly clean after crews worked through the night and in the early morning clearing the oil. Clear plastic bags sat in piles, full of sand and tar balls, and some empty stretches of beach were still littered with grapefruit sized tar patties.

FLORIDA’S SHORES
Winds continued to blow two patchy, orange oil plumes from the spill toward the white sands of the western Florida Panhandle in the first week of June 2010, as skimmers worked to collect the crude before it came ashore. The Florida Department of Environmental Protection said one of the slicks is as close as 3 miles south of Pensacola Pass, an inlet next to a stretch of the Gulf Islands National Seashore and the tourist hotels of Pensacola Beach.

Sunday, June 13, 2010
Oil collected on the water’s surface near the site of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Oil continued to flow from the wellhead some 5,000 feet below the surface. The Coast Guard demanded that BP step up its efforts to contain the oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico by the end of the weekend, telling the British oil giant that its slow pace in stopping the spill is becoming increasingly alarming as the disaster fouled the coastline in ugly new ways. Workers loaded bags of contaminated sand as they clean up oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill along the beach.

NEW ORLEANS
BP mounted a more aggressive response to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico as it started deploying undersea sensors to better measure the ferocious flow of crude while drawing up new plans to meet a government demand that it speed up the containment effort ahead of President Barack Obama’s visit to the coast. The financial ramifications of the disaster are growing by the day as the White House and states put pressure on BP to set aside billions of dollars to pay spill-related claims in a move that could quickly drain the company’s cash reserves and hasten its path toward possible bankruptcy.

One of the actions BP took Sunday was to use robotic submarines to position sensors inside the well to gauge how much oil is spilling. The robots were expected to insert the pressure sensors through a line used to inject methanol – an anti-freeze meant to prevent the buildup of ice-like slush – into a containment cap seated over the ruptured pipe. BP was installing the sensors at the request of a federal team of scientists tasked with estimating the flow. The necessary equipment was first identified last week, and the installation procedures were approved over the weekend.

BP is currently capturing about 630,000 gallons of oil a day, but hundreds thousands more are still escaping into the Gulf. The company has said that it could begin siphoning an additional 400,000 gallons a day by burning it using a specialized boom being installed on a rig – and any new success would be welcome news for Obama.

Obama wanted an independent, third party to administer an escrow account paid for by BP to compensate those with “legitimate” claims for damages. The amount of money set aside will be discussed during talks this week between the White House and BP, but the request will most definitely be in the billions.

Waste Management received a contract from BP to transport waste produced by cleanup crews assigned to work the stretch of the coastline. Ken Haldin, a Waste Management spokesman, said Sunday that the company has designated 65 trucks and 535 containers that are being filled with solid oil waste.

Waste Management has designated three landfills in three different states that are operated by the company to handle the oily refuse. Before the refuse is dumped, it has to be analyzed by both the waste removal company and by local government environmental authorities to make sure it is nonhazardous.

Waste Management also is handling some of the liquid waste skimmed from the ocean by cleanup crews, and has set up special equipment, including vacuum trucks, along the docks that separates oil from the water. Once separated, the oil will be resold to oil services companies.

The oil spill is gaining international ramifications with furore growing between the US and the UK. Already during the first week of June 2010, the normally smooth waters of US-British relations were rocked by growing signs of strain over objections to US treatment of the officers and stockholders of BP, a big-oil company listed on the London stock exchange. Some British officials and the London press are of the view that US officials – President Obama topping the list – were increasingly mixing anti-British vitriol into their growing frustration with the formerly “British Petroleum” named, formerly British-owned BP.

On Friday, the European Union announced it was responding to a request by US authorities for various types of booms to help contain the spilled oil.

Sweden, Germany, Norway, the UK, and the European Maritime Safety Agency all responded with offers and are working “flat out” to deliver the equipment as soon as possible. The Netherlands responded to an earlier request by providing three sweeping arms which are already operating in the Gulf.

But the oil leak is also having unanticipated international repercussions, with the US already quietly discussing the Gulf disaster and its potential extended impact with Cuba, the country most likely to be the first non-US victim if the oil slick advances beyond Florida into the Caribbean.

The US, which has modestly expanded contacts with the Cuban government under the Obama administration, has had some low-level discussions with the Cubans about the Gulf oil leak and is keeping channels of communication open in light of the oil’s potential trajectory according to State Department officials.

But some oil experts say the US needs to look beyond the current catastrophe to consider a potential future oil disaster. With Cuba set to commence oil exploration in its northern territorial waters sometime in the next six to nine months, they see a stark scenario under which the US embargo on Cuba would prevent American oilfield and petroleum-technology companies from taking part in any disaster response.

Mr. Piñón, a former Conoco and BP oil executive, says the Obama administration should do for petroleum equipment and services trade with Cuba what the Clinton administration did for agricultural trade – exempt it from the embargo.

An executive order paving the way for US companies to intervene in a Cuban oil disaster was one of the recommendations of a Cuba Task Force organized by the Brookings Institution in Washington. Piñón serves on the task force and co-authored a recent paper analyzing Cuban oil issues in light of the Gulf disaster.
Before the Gulf spill, much of the focus of analysis of Cuba’s move into oil exploration and production was on the impact it will have on the current regime, Cuba’s relations with current oil-supplier Venezuela, and an eventual transition government in Havana.

In the meanwhile, more than 130 lawsuits relating to the spill have been filed.
******

Shanthi Rajagopal

The tensions between China and Taiwan find their roots in the 1949 Chinese revolution, when communists led by Chairman Mao claimed control of the mainland. The then Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek withdrew to Taiwan, with two million refugees, vowing to reclaim the mainland. China’s main motive to keep Taiwan under their jurisdiction is that it will strengthen China strategically. The Communist Government in Beijing has sworn to all the international nations that whatever power required shall be applied keep the island conquered under them. Mainland China has considered Taiwan a renegade province ever since communist forces drove the nationalists off the mainland in 1949. China has repeatedly threatened to use military power against the island if it declares independence and has staged a series of naval exercises off the coast of Taiwan.

The actual conflict arises from The Taiwan relations Act which was established to combat communism and aid in the spread of globalization and capitalism. The Act declares that if any outside Nation attacks Taiwan, the US should come to its defense. Since it was made during the Cold War Era, the situation does not prevail now.

The China Government is ready to support the economic and political stability in entire East Asia but do not want to come into any compromise where Taiwan’s Independence is concerned. While Chinese leaders prefer peaceful means for dealing the pro independence course of Taiwan’s pro independence course, the potential for a major conflict remains high. Whenever the Taiwanese moves towards independence they are backed by the US Neo conservatives. They look up to China as a potential military rival and have been putting greater arms sale from US.

 History

With the incursion of so many refugees in 1949, bitterness grew between the millions of native Taiwanese and the mainland newcomers. The tensions reached such a point that Chiang imposed a “perpetual” martial law over the island for the next 38 years. Thousands of opponents were executed under his rule, and severe restrictions were placed on civil and political liberties.

1945-1949 Civil War

The end of the World War II saw Taiwan being handed over to the control of mainland China, under the Kuomintang (nationalist) government of General Chiang Kai-shek. The move brought to an end more than 50 years of Japanese control.

Chiang left no stone unturned to quickly formalise the island’s status as a province of China. Taiwan itself initially welcomed liberation from Japanese rule, but many quickly came to resent the corruption of the new government and what was seen as the exploitation of Taiwanese resources for mainland post-war reconstruction. Taiwanese industry, which had been closely tied to Japan, was redirected to supply the needs of the mainland and the island’s economy slid into crisis. Unemployment soared and, as protests grew, a brutal crackdown took place in 1947.

This led to the “the White Terror” when an estimated 18,000 – 30,000 members of the island’s native-born political and academic elite were executed as Chiang’s government asserted its control. For decades afterwards the government insisted the action was a crackdown on communists and gangsters.

The war with the Japanese came to an end but not so the civil war on the mainland with Mao Zedong’s communist forces resuming more fiercely than ever with the communists increasingly gaining the upper hand. As defeat loomed hundreds of thousands of Chiang’s soldiers defected to the communist side.

1949-1955 Withdrawal to Taiwan

In October 1949 Chairman Mao’s communists took control on the mainland. Chiang Kai-shek withdrew his Kuomintang army to Taiwan, taking with him China’s entire gold reserves. He was followed by more than 1.5 million refugees who fled with him adding to resentment among native Taiwanese against what they saw as a mainland invasion.

In December Chiang declared Taipei the temporary capital of China, vowing that he would eventually “recover the mainland”. He also issued a decree imposing perpetual martial law – an order not rescinded until 38 years later. As part of the claim to represent all China, all the institutions of mainland government were transferred to Taiwan, including the parliament, which had representatives for all mainland provinces.

Harsh restrictions were imposed on civil and political liberties by Chiang’s government, jailing or executing thousands of opponents and clamping down on the use of native Taiwanese dialects.

Initially the US kept well out of the stand-off between the two Chinas. But with the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 and Chinese troops fighting in Korea, Taiwan was seen as part of the west’s bulwark against communist expansionism. The US poured in money and military supplies. A planned communist invasion in 1950 was thwarted when President Truman ordered the US 7th Fleet into the Taiwan Straits.

U.S. President Harry S. Truman ordered the 7th Fleet into the Taiwan Strait to prevent possible Chinese attack on the island. It was the first time the United States had intervened in the conflict between the island and mainland. The U.S. considered Taiwan a buffer against communist expansion in Asia and provided the island money and military supplies.   

1955-1972 Cold War Fortress

Despite sporadic attacks from the mainland Taiwan enjoyed huge economic growth during the 1950s and early 60s, backed up by massive inflows of US funds and demand for its products.

Domestically President Chiang’s was a increasingly dictatorial ruler, backed up by the military secret service, the Taiwan Garrison Command. Chiang’s position was under challenge from two sides. On the one hand there was growing support for outright independence among the native

During the 1960s some native Taiwanese, upset by the rule of the mainland minority, began to call for independence from China. It was during this time that focus shifted from reclaiming the mainland to developing the island itself.

Taiwanese resented what they saw as minority rule by mainlanders. On the other, there was the ever-present threat of communist invasion.

As the Kuomintang government began to absorb a younger generation of mainlanders and native Taiwanese, the focus slowly began to shift from reconquest of the mainland to the development of the island itself. But much of the real power remained firmly in the hands of President Chiang and his son, Chiang Ching-kuo.

In the late 1960s Taiwan began to lose out to the shifting tide of Cold War politics. Washington and Beijing developed closer ties to counter what they saw as Soviet expansionism and it seemed that Taiwan was losing the support of its principal international backer.  But it was also during this period that the U.S. and other countries began improving relations with China as a way to prevent Soviet expansionism

In 1971 with international favour swinging towards Beijing, Taipei lost possession of China’s seat on the UN Security Council to the mainland government. In disgust Chiang walked out of the UN.

1972-1986

Yet another hard blow came by Taiwan when US President Richard Nixon’s made his historic visit to China in 1972, paving the way for Washington and Beijing to establish diplomatic relations seven years later. Under its “one China” policy Beijing insisted that countries wanting to establish diplomatic relations must automatically break off official ties with Taipei and during the 1970s other western countries and their allies followed Washington’s lead.

To counter act this, pro-Taiwan members of the US Congress passed the Taiwan Relations Act, allowing for the sale of defence equipment to Taiwan and providing vague guarantees for the island’s security. Nonetheless as China made its way onto the world stage Taiwan found itself increasingly pushed off it.

President Chiang died in 1975 and three years later his son replaced him as president, raising opposition alarm that the appointment heralded the start of a Chiang dynasty.

In 1979 opposition groups organised a protest rally in the southern city of Kaohsiung to mark International Human Rights Day.

The United States formally recognized the People’s Republic of China, severing official diplomatic relations with Taiwan, now under the rule of Chiang’s son, Chiang Ching-kuo. The U.S. move meant that America accepted Beijing’s “one China” mandate and abandoned its defense pact with the island. Within months, though, the U.S. Congress reinstated unofficial economic ties with Taiwan, including the sale of arms.

Democratic movements began to stir on Taiwan in 1979. A rally in the southern city of Kaohsiung turned violent and was crushed by police. The leaders were arrested and later defended by a little-known, but successful, maritime commerce lawyer named Chen Shui-bian. Chen, twenty years later, would become the first non-Nationalist party elected Taiwanese president.                                                                     

During the 1980s a series of financial scandals rocked the Kuomintang government and criticism grew of Taiwan’s continued one-party rule. In 1985 Chiang opened talks with the domestic opposition and a year later Taiwan’s first opposition party, the Democratic Progressive Party, was born.

1986-1999 Path to Democracy

During the 1980s the process of democratisation became increasingly brisk. The dropping of martial law in 1987 and the death of President Chiang Ching-kuo a year later opened the door to a new era of Taiwanese politics as Lee Teng-hui became the island’s first native-born president.  Taiwan dropped its martial law in 1987, only a year before the death of Chiang Ching-kuo. On Chiang’s death, Vice President Lee Teng-hui became the first native islander to become president, and in 1990, the National Assembly elected him to a full six-year term.

In 1989 as pro-democracy protests swept China, Taiwan held its first elections in which parties other than the Kuomintang were allowed to stand. A year later surviving members of parliament representing provinces on the mainland were retired, ending Taipei’s claim to be the government of all China.

Taiwan’s confidence increased. It began to court diplomatic ties, offering trade and aid in return. Dialogue also developed with Beijing but moves towards Taiwan asserting its de facto independence drew angry reactions from the mainland.

Lee tried to strengthen diplomatic relations with countries around the world, including the U.S. In 1995 relations threatened to boil over when President Lee’s visit to the US and the build up to Taiwan’s first democratic presidential elections sparked a tense military stand-off. Many in Taiwan said the mainland was trying to influence voting in the election by the show of force.

The U.S. responded by sending warships to the straits, in what would become the largest show of naval force since the Vietnam War. President Clinton ordered to aircraft carrier battle groups to patrol the area. The elections went forward as planned and Lee decisively won a second term.               

With President Lee re-elected by popular mandate in 1996, Taiwan’s relations with the mainland continued on a rollercoaster ride. Economic links slowly expanded but Beijing remained edgy about Taiwan acting as an independent state. Any hint that Taiwan was moving towards independence produced warnings of military intervention.

The Hong Kong handover

In 1997, as Britain prepared to return control of Hong Kong to China, Taiwan conducted live military exercises in the Straits. Experts said it was to demonstrate that Taiwan would not quietly follow the Hong Kong example. The United States began shipping fighter jets to Taiwan that year, and on the island itself the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party won municipal elections.

In 1999, President Lee announced that Taiwan enjoyed a “special state-to-state relationship” with China. This statement of implied state sovereignty angered Beijing. Taipei backed away from the position, but talks between the two leaderships were cut off.     

2000-2002 Independence Dilemma

A new rift between Taiwan and China was threatened by the election to the presidency in March 2000 of Chen Shui-bian of the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).

But Chen, a former lawyer with a populist touch, took care not to antagonise Beijing during the election.

He promised not to declare independence so long as Beijing did not use force against Taiwan. He also pledged not to hold a referendum on independence or reunification and offered several concessions and gestures towards China, such as opening up direct trade links.

But China remained distrustful of Chen’s motives, regularly claiming his real ambition was to attain full independence for the island.

The lack of progress with China, which continued to refuse to hold talks with Chen, may have prompted him to take a harder line.

In August 2002 he made a veiled threat to hold a referendum and referred to China and Taiwan as each being a country on either side of the Taiwan Strait – “one side, one country”.

China has always seen Taiwan as a renegade province and Mr Chen’s comments were seen by some as a coded call for formal independence.

Analysts said the comments appeared to have been designed to win the support of independence activists inside the DPP. But with China hanging on his every word, Mr Chen must have known his comments would infuriate Beijing too.

A Timeline of Relations between Taiwan and China

1949 – Communist forces led by Mao Zedong defeat Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists, driving him and more than a million followers to Taiwan. Chiang sets up a government-in-exile and vows to “recover the mainland”.

1954 – The U.S. signs a mutual-defense treaty with Taiwan.

1958 – China attacks the island of Quemoy, a base for about 100,000 Nationalist troops in the Taiwan Strait, in a bid to “liberate” Taiwan. The U.S. deploys the Seventh Fleet; the Chinese back off.

1971 – Taiwan is expelled from the United Nations and its seat given to China, following a secret visit to Beijing by the then U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

1972 – U.S. President Richard Nixon visits China, paving the way for the resumption of full diplomatic relations between the two nations and leading to the end of formal U.S. ties with Taiwan.

1979 – The U.S. cuts formal links with Taiwan and agrees to abide by Beijing’s “one China” policy

1987 – Taiwan lifts martial law after 38 years and allows its nationals to visit relatives in China for the first time

1988 – Lee Teng-hui becomes the island’s first native Taiwanese President, and democratic reforms begin to take hold

1989 – China fears that Taiwan will declare a formal split after the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) fares well in parliamentary and local-government polls.

1993 – The first high-level talks between China and Taiwan take place in Singapore

1995 – A visit to the U.S. by President Lee prompts China to perform missile tests and military exercises in the Taiwan Strait just before the island’s first presidential election by universal suffrage. Lee wins.

1999 – Lee infuriates Beijing by saying China and Taiwan enjoy a “special state-to-state relationship,” implying that Taiwan is an independent sovereign nation.

2000 – DPP candidate Chen Shui-bian, also a native Taiwanese, is elected President, ending more than 50 years of Kuomintang rule.

2001 – Taiwan eases restrictions on its companies wanting to invest in China. Two journalists from the mainland’s Xinhua News Agency become the first Chinese reporters to visit Taiwan under the island’s new “open door” policy

2002 – President Chen defines the status quo as “one country on each side of the Taiwan Strait,” sparking criticism from Beijing and his domestic opponents

2003 – A Taiwan airliner makes the first civilian flight to the mainland since 1949. Chen, meanwhile, announces plans for a referendum on election day on March 20, 2004, to ask voters whether the island should increase its defense budget and engage in dialogue with Beijing

2005 – Taiwanese and Chinese airlines fly the first nonstop charter flights between the two sides for the Chinese New Year.

2008- Taiwan Presidential election

Shortly after its legislative elections, Taiwan held a presidential election on March 22, 2008. Former President Chen Shui-Bian was a second-term incumbent, and thus barred from re-election. The two official candidates were the Democratic Progressive Party’s Frank Hsieh and the Kuomintang’s Ma Ying-Jeou. Ma Ying-Jeou won the election by a large margin

Today’s Scenario – May 26, 2010

A Chinese ballistic and cruise missile buildup targeting Taiwan could ultimately undermine the strategic security of other nations in Asia as well as the United States, certain reports.

China is believed to have more than 1,000 missiles trained on Taiwan. While Taiwan has an autonomous government, Beijing claims the island state as its territory and has threatened to use force should it pursue formal independence.

“Driven in large measure by a Taiwan scenario, China’s capacity to conduct a successful aerospace campaign to quickly gain a decisive advantage in the air is growing faster than the defenses that its neighbors, including Taiwan, Japan, perhaps India, and even U.S. forces operating in the Western Pacific, can field,” the Washington Times quoted the report, Evolving Aerospace Trends in the Asia-Pacific Region, as stating.

Highly accurate long-range missiles developed by Beijing “are altering the strategic landscape,” the document says, noting that such weapons include ground-launched cruise missiles and ballistic missiles with non-nuclear warheads.

Because of their speed, precision, and difficulties in fielding viable defenses, these systems — if deployed in sufficient numbers — have the potential to provide [China] with a decisive military edge in the event of conflict over territorial or sovereignty claims as per analysts Ian Easton and former Air Force Maj. Mark Stokes.

The analysts add that the buildup could prompt China’s neighbors to seek similar defense capabilities and that China’s missile-based strategy has the potential to start an arms race in long-range precision strike capabilities.

China has also begun work on a ballistic missile that could target an aircraft carrier, according to the assessment.

The nation has deployed short-range missiles to installations at Ganzhou, Jinhua, Leping, Meizhou and Yongan, and medium-range missiles to bases at Chuixiong, Chizhou, Kurle, Laiwu and Qimen, the document states.

The country has placed land-based cruise missiles at its Guiyang, Liuzhou and Yichun bases, the analysis asserts.

The report warns that over time, the same capabilities arrayed against Taiwan could be brought to bear in pursuit of other sovereignty claims around the country.

Combined with improvements to China’s air capabilities and regional monitoring systems, its missile development has “profound strategic implications for the U.S.,” according to the document. Reporters warn that given the certainty of the Asia-Pacific to U.S. global interests, China’s aerospace development certainly warrants further attention.

China is this month to carry out its largest military exercises of the year aimed at sending a ’substantial warning’ to Taiwan separatists. While a recent Pentagon report warns that China is considering further coercive moves, Beijing accuses the United States of fabricating a ‘China threat’ to continue arms sales to Taiwan.  Although cross-straits relations have improved in recent months, with Beijing and Taipei seeking closer business links, muted saber rattling continues.

The China Taiwan Conflict seems to go a long way before any constructive measures are taken on both sides.

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Shanthi Rajagopal

Heartening news for all IAS and IPS aspirants- Tenacity pays. Two teenagers prove to us that hard work, a never-say-die attitude and a determination to succeed will lead us to our goal within no time.

A 13-year-old American became the youngest climber to ever summit Mount Everest on Saturday May 22 2010, gaining renown for the feat while renewing controversy over a trend of young record-breaking adventurers.

Jordan Romero’s journey was tracked through GPS coordinates on his blog, logging his team’s ascent up Everest, which is 29,028 feet (8,847 meters) above sea level.

Before Jordan, the record was previously held by Ming Kipa of Nepal, who was 15 when she made the climb in 2003 with her brother and sister, and 16-year-old Temba Tsheri of Nepal.

Romero left for the peak from the Chinese side of the mountain after Nepal denied him permission on age grounds. Prior to his starting out, Romero, of Big Bear, California, said he wanted to climb Everest to inspire more young people to get outdoors. He feared that obese children were the future of America, the way things are going. He hoped to change that by doing what he did – climbing and motivational speaking.

He also had a desire to do something big in life, and he has succeeded beyond expectation. Jordan now has climbed six of the seven highest peaks on seven continents, known as the Seven Summits. His father Paul Romero reports that this was not an isolated vacation and that this was a lifestyle.

Romero’s family started tackling the Seven Summits in summer 2005. He was just 9 when they climbed 19,341 feet (5,895 meters) to the peak of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania.  There is a debate about whether the tallest mountain in Oceania is Kosciuszko in mainland Australia or Carstensz Pyramid in Indonesia, so Romero and his family climbed both. The only peak left for him to climb after Everest is the Vinson Massif in Antarctica, which is 16,067 feet (4,897 meters). A trip there is planned for December 2010.

Jordan Romero called his mother, Leigh Anne Drake, 37, from a satellite phone when he reached the peak Saturday along with his father, stepmother and a team of three guides and told her proudly that he was calling from the top of the world.

Jordan decided in the fourth grade that he wanted to climb the tallest mountains on each of the seven continents. His mother and father are avid fans of the outdoors who took their son biking and hiking at an early age, but neither had experience with mountaineering until Jordan made his decision.

When he first wanted to go hiking, his mother and a friend took Jordan for a six-mile hike near their home. He whined and cried the entire time, she recalled, but when they got down, he wanted to keep training. They decided to support him.  Jordan climbed the first peak on the list — Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania — when he was 9. He has since then climbed Mt. Kosciusko in Australia, Mt. Elbrus in Russia, Mt. Aconcagua in Argentina and Mt. McKinley in Alaska.

The eighth grader enrolled in independent study this semester to pursue the Everest climb. He took algebra books and writing journals with him.

Brent Bishop, 43, who has climbed to the top of Mt. Everest twice and whose father was on the first American team to reach the summit in 1963, said he was amazed by Jordan’s accomplishment but wary for other young climbers.

The main danger for a young person isn’t the climbing, but the altitude. Bishop feels that the planning and the weather cooperated to make the trip work out but the danger is for someone who is 13 who gets caught up high in bad weather and run out of bottled oxygen. Issues with cerebral impairment might then crop up.

Jordan’s group still has to make the trek down the mountain, a dangerous route that every year claims lives. After that, to complete his goal he has to climb one more mountain: Vinson Massif in Antarctica.

Hero from India

Not to be outdone, a 16-year-old schoolboy from the National Capital Region in India, Arjun Vajpai, became the youngest Indian to successfully climb the world’s highest peak, 8,848-metre-high Mount Everest, via the traditional South Col route in Nepal.

His mother Priya Vajpai is over the moon at her son’s achievement. She reports that she has no words to describe just how proud she was. She knew that he was going to push for the peak on May 22 2010 on a Saturday morning and when at 6.30 a.m., members of the team coordinating the climb phoned to tell them that Arjun had successfully managed to climb Mt. Everest and that he was safe, they all jumped for joy.

They are yet to speak to him and are waiting for him to reach back to his base camp. Admitting that she had been worried about Arjun’s safety when he told them about his decision to join a group trying to conquer the Everest, Ms. Vajpai told that Arjun’s self-motivation and determination was contagious and that they had to trust him about this decision. When she expressed her concern about the risk involved in the climb, he told her to stop worrying.

Arjun is a student of Ryan International School, at Sector 39 in Noida. According to his mother, he has been always been an outdoor person and loves trekking, hiking, football and basket ball. He was introduced to mountaineering only three years ago, but took to it like a fish to water.

Arjun was part of a 12-member expedition team that has a record number of Indian climbers trying their luck individually. His father Sanjiv Vajpai, a former Army officer, said he was initially afraid to let Arjun go on the expedition. But his instructors at the Nehru Mountaineering Institute, where he did two mountaineering courses, said he had both the physical and mental ability to summit Mt. Everest and so his parents decided to let him go.

Arjun equalled the record of a Nepalese Sherpa Temba Tsheri, who also climbed the peak when he was sixteen. Arjun’s team was led by Apa Sherpa, 50, who broke his own record to become the first man to climb the peak for a record 20th time.

The Noida boy also broke the record of Krushnaa Patil, 18, from Maharashtra, who became the youngest Indian to reach the highest peak in 2009.

Along with Arjun, also making it to the top was an Indian woman Mamta Sodha, who reached the summit at 10:24 a.m. The feat of the two was conveyed to PTI on phone by Chunu Shrestha of the Asian Trekkers, who had organised the expedition.

*****

Bharathi B

Large-scale earthquake that occurred January 12, 2010, on the West Indian island of Hispaniola, comprising the countries of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Most severely affected was Haiti, occupying the western third of the island. More than 2,00,000 people were killed, and over a million were displaced by the disaster.

The earthquake

The earthquake hit at 4:53 pm some 15 miles (25 km) southwest of the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince. The initial shock registered a magnitude of 7.0 and was soon followed by two aftershocks of magnitudes 5.9 and 5.5. More aftershocks occurred in the following days, including another one of magnitude 5.9 that struck on January 20 at Petit Goâve, a town some 35 miles (55 km) west of Port-au-Prince. Seismologists asserted that minor tremors would likely persist for months or even years. Haiti had not been hit by an earthquake of such enormity since the 18th century, the closest in force being a 1984 shock of magnitude 6.9. A magnitude-8.0 earthquake had struck the Dominican Republic in 1946.

The earthquake was generated by the movement of the Caribbean tectonic plate eastward along the Enriquillo–Plantain Garden strike-slip fault system, a transform boundary that separates the Gonâve microplate—the fragment of the North American Plate upon which Haiti is situated—from the Caribbean Plate. Occurring at a depth of 8.1 miles (13 km), the temblor was fairly shallow, which increased the degree of shaking at the Earth’s surface. The shocks were felt throughout Haiti and the Dominican Republic as well as in parts of nearby Cuba, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico. The densely populated region around Port-au-Prince, located on the Gulf of Gonâve, was among those most heavily affected. Farther south the city of Jacmel also sustained significant damage, and to the west the city of Léogâne, even closer to the epicentre than Port-au-Prince, was essentially leveled.

A country in ruins

The collapsed buildings defining the landscape of the disaster area came as a consequence of Haiti’s lack of building codes. Without adequate reinforcement, the buildings disintegrated under the force of the quake, killing or trapping their occupants. In Port-au-Prince the cathedral and the National Palace were both heavily damaged, as were the United Nations headquarters, national penitentiary, and parliament building. The city, already beset by a strained and inadequate infrastructure and still recovering from the two tropical storms and two hurricanes of August–September 2008, was ill-equipped to deal with such a disaster. Other affected areas of the country—faced with comparable weaknesses—were similarly unprepared.

In the aftermath of the quake, efforts by citizens and international aid organizations to provide medical assistance, food, and water to survivors were hampered by the failure of the electric power system (which already was unreliable), loss of communication lines, and roads blocked with debris. A week after the event, little aid had reached beyond Port-au-Prince; after another week, supplies were being distributed only sporadically to other urban areas. Operations to rescue those trapped under the wreckage—which had freed over 100 people—had mostly ceased two weeks into the crisis, as hope that anyone could have survived for that length of time without food or water began to fade. However, there were still occasional recoveries of people who had managed to survive such confinement for weeks by rationing the meagre supplies available to them.

A people in crisis

It was estimated that some three million people were affected by the quake—nearly one-third of the country’s total population. Of these, over one million were left homeless. In the devastated urban areas, the displaced were forced to squat in ersatz cities composed of found materials and donated tents. Looting—restrained in the early days following the quake—became more prevalent in the absence of sufficient supplies and was exacerbated in the capital by the escape of several thousand prisoners from the damaged penitentiary. In the second week of the aftermath, many urbanites began streaming into outlying areas, either of their own volition or as a result of governmental relocation programs engineered to alleviate crowded and unsanitary conditions. Those who remained were encouraged by aid agencies to construct more-substantial provisional housing using tarpaulins—and, later, donated lumber and sheet metal—in preparation for the rainy season and the hurricane season.

Because many hospitals had been rendered unusable, survivors were forced to wait days for treatment and, with morgues quickly reaching capacity, corpses were stacked in the streets. The onset of decay forced the interment of many bodies in mass graves, and recovery of those buried under the rubble was impeded by a shortage of heavy-lifting equipment, making death tolls difficult to determine. Figures released by Haitian government officials at the end of March placed the death toll at 222,570 people, though there was significant disagreement over the exact figure, and some estimated that nearly a hundred thousand more had perished. Given the difficulty of observing documentation procedures in the rush to dispose of the dead, it was considered unlikely that a definitive total would ever be established.

Further deaths occurred as serious injuries went untreated in the absence of medical staff and supplies. The orphans created by these mass mortalities—as well as those whose parents had died prior to the quake—were left vulnerable to abuse and human trafficking. Though adoptions of Haitian children by foreign nationals—particularly in the United States—were expedited, the process was slowed by the efforts of Haitian and foreign authorities to ensure that the children did not have living relatives, as orphanages had often temporarily accommodated the children of the destitute.

Because the infrastructure of the country’s computer network was largely unaffected, electronic media emerged as a useful mode for connecting those separated by the quake and for coordinating relief efforts. Survivors who were able to access the Internet—and friends and relatives abroad—took to social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook in search of information on those missing in the wake of the catastrophe. Feeds from these sites also assisted aid organizations in constructing maps of the areas affected and in determining where to channel resources. The many Haitians lacking Internet access were able to contribute updates via text messaging on mobile phones.

The general disorder created by the earthquake—combined with the destruction of the country’s electoral headquarters and the death of UN officials working in concert with the Haitian electoral council—prompted Haitian Pres. René Préval to defer legislative elections that had been scheduled for the end of February. Préval’s term in office was set to end the following year.

Humanitarian aid

Humanitarian aid was promised by numerous organizations—spearheaded by the United Nations and the International Red Cross—and many countries in the region and around the world sent doctors, relief workers, and supplies. Former U.S. president Bill Clinton, who had in May 2009 been named the UN special envoy to Haiti, was assigned the task of coordinating the efforts of the disparate aid initiatives. In the months following the disaster, Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive expressed concern that foreign nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)—which were numerous in Haiti even prior to the quake and which bore responsibility for diverse aspects of the recovery—were not sufficiently accounting for the use of their resources, making it challenging for the Haitian government to assess where its own resources could best be deployed. The NGOs, in turn, were hindered by their own unwieldy bureaucratic structures and found interorganizational communication difficult. The U.S. military—though providing considerable initial support in the form of equipment, logistics coordination, and personnel—had withdrawn all but a fraction of its forces by the second week of March, leaving UN peacekeepers and Haitian police to maintain order.

Using a model that had proved successful in Europe after the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, programs were initiated abroad whereby mobile phone users could make donations via text messages. A sizeable portion of the aid gathered in the United States was channeled through mobile phone companies. A celebrity telethon hosted by Haitian American rapper Wyclef Jean in New York City and American actor George Clooney in Los Angeles and featuring numerous other entertainers was broadcast internationally and generated over $60 million.

A significant portion of Haiti’s debt had been cancelled the previous year as part of the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries initiative of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, but the country still owed more than $1 billion to a range of creditors. With its economy barely functioning, the country appeared unlikely to meet those obligations. In February the G7 countries forgave the remaining portion of Haiti’s debt to them, and in March the Inter-American Development Bank forgave $447 million and pledged over $30 million in further support. A UN donor conference in New York City in late March generated pledges of $9.9 billion, with $5.3 billion to be used during the first two years of reconstruction efforts. The bulk of the sum was put forth by the United States and the European Union (EU). The donor conference also established the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, a partnership between the Haitian government and foreign donors that, under the chairmanship of Clinton and Préval, would disburse aid funds to a variety of reconstruction efforts. The commission was approved by the Haitian parliament in April, 2010.

*****

Earthquake is the sudden shaking of the ground caused by a disturbance deeper within the crust of the Earth.

Most earthquakes occur when masses of rock straining against one another along fault lines suddenly fracture and slip. The Earth’s major earthquakes occur mainly in belts coinciding with the margins of tectonic plates. These include the Circum-Pacific Belt, which affects New Zealand, New Guinea, Japan, the Aleutian Islands, Alaska, and the western coasts of North and South America; the Alpide Belt, which passes through the Mediterranean region eastward through Asia; oceanic ridges in the Arctic, Atlantic, and western Indian oceans; and the rift valleys of East Africa. The “size,” or magnitude, of earthquakes is usually expressed in terms of the Richter scale, which assigns levels from 1.0 or lower to 8.0 or higher. The largest quake ever recorded (Richter magnitude 9.5) occurred off the coast of Chile in 1960. The “strength” of an earthquake is rated in intensity scales such as the Mercalli scale, which assigns qualitative measures of damage to terrain and structures that range from “not felt” to “damage nearly total.” The most destructive quake of modern times occurred in 1976, when the city of Tangshan, China, was leveled and more than 250,000 people killed.

It is any sudden shaking of the ground caused by the passage of seismic waves through the Earth’s rocks. Seismic waves are produced when some form of energy stored in the Earth’s crust is suddenly released, usually when masses of rock straining against one another suddenly fracture and “slip.” Earthquakes occur most often along geologic faults, narrow zones where rock masses move in relation to one another. The major fault lines of the world are located at the fringes of the huge tectonic plates that make up the Earth’s crust.

Little was understood about earthquakes until the emergence of seismology at the beginning of the 20th century. Seismology, which involves the scientific study of all aspects of earthquakes, has yielded answers to such long-standing questions as why and how earthquakes occur.

About 50,000 earthquakes large enough to be noticed without the aid of instruments occur annually over the entire Earth. Of these, approximately 100 are of sufficient size to produce substantial damage if their centres are near areas of habitation. Very great earthquakes occur on average about once per year. Over the centuries they have been responsible for millions of deaths and an incalculable amount of damage to property (see the table of major historical earthquakes).

The nature of earthquakes

Causes of earthquakes

The Earth’s major earthquakes occur mainly in belts coinciding with the margins of tectonic plates . This has long been apparent from early catalogs of felt earthquakes and is even more readily discernible in modern seismicity maps, which show instrumentally determined epicentres. The most important earthquake belt is the Circum-Pacific Belt, which affects many populated coastal regions around the Pacific Ocean—for example, those of New Zealand, New Guinea, Japan, the Aleutian Islands, Alaska, and the western coasts of North and South America. It is estimated that 80 percent of the energy presently released in earthquakes comes from those whose epicentres are in this belt. The seismic activity is by no means uniform throughout the belt, and there are a number of branches at various points. Because at many places the Circum-Pacific Belt is associated with volcanic activity, it has been popularly dubbed the “Pacific Ring of Fire.”

A second belt, known as the Alpide Belt, passes through the Mediterranean region eastward through Asia and joins the Circum-Pacific Belt in the East Indies. The energy released in earthquakes from this belt is about 15 percent of the world total. There also are striking connected belts of seismic activity, mainly along oceanic ridges—including those in the Arctic Ocean, the Atlantic Ocean, and the western Indian Ocean—and along the rift valleys of East Africa. This global seismicity distribution is best understood in terms of its plate tectonic setting.

Natural forces

Earthquakes are caused by the sudden release of energy within some limited region of the rocks of the Earth. The energy can be released by elastic strain, gravity, chemical reactions, or even the motion of massive bodies. Of all these the release of elastic strain is the most important cause, because this form of energy is the only kind that can be stored in sufficient quantity in the Earth to produce major disturbances. Earthquakes associated with this type of energy release are called tectonic earthquakes.

Tectonics

Tectonic earthquakes are explained by the so-called elastic rebound theory, formulated by the American geologist Harry Fielding Reid after the San Andreas Fault ruptured in 1906, generating the great San Francisco earthquake. According to the theory, a tectonic earthquake occurs when strains in rock masses have accumulated to a point where the resulting stresses exceed the strength of the rocks, and sudden fracturing results. The fractures propagate rapidly through the rock, usually tending in the same direction and sometimes extending many kilometres along a local zone of weakness. In 1906, for instance, the San Andreas Fault slipped along a plane 430 km (270 miles) long. Along this line the ground was displaced horizontally as much as 6 metres (20 feet).

As a fault rupture progresses along or up the fault, rock masses are flung in opposite directions and thus spring back to a position where there is less strain. At any one point this movement may take place not at once but rather in irregular steps; these sudden slowings and restartings give rise to the vibrations that propagate as seismic waves. Such irregular properties of fault rupture are now included in the modeling of earthquake sources, both physically and mathematically. Roughnesses along the fault are referred to as asperities, and places where the rupture slows or stops are said to be fault barriers. Fault rupture starts at the earthquake focus, a spot that in many cases is close to 5–15 km under the surface. The rupture propagates in one or both directions over the fault plane until stopped or slowed at a barrier. Sometimes, instead of being stopped at the barrier, the fault rupture recommences on the far side; at other times the stresses in the rocks break the barrier, and the rupture continues.

Earthquakes have different properties depending on the type of fault slip that causes them. The usual fault model has a “strike” (that is, the direction from north taken by a horizontal line in the fault plane) and a “dip” (the angle from the horizontal shown by the steepest slope in the fault). The lower wall of an inclined fault is called the footwall. Lying over the footwall is the hanging wall. When rock masses slip past each other parallel to the strike, the movement is known as strike-slip faulting. Movement parallel to the dip is called dip-slip faulting. Strike-slip faults are right lateral or left lateral, depending on whether the block on the opposite side of the fault from an observer has moved to the right or left. In dip-slip faults, if the hanging-wall block moves downward relative to the footwall block, it is called “normal” faulting; the opposite motion, with the hanging wall moving upward relative to the footwall, produces reverse or thrust faulting.

All known faults are assumed to have been the seat of one or more earthquakes in the past, though tectonic movements along faults are often slow, and most geologically ancient faults are now aseismic (that is, they no longer cause earthquakes). The actual faulting associated with an earthquake may be complex, and it is often not clear whether in a particular earthquake the total energy issues from a single fault plane.

Observed geologic faults sometimes show relative displacements on the order of hundreds of kilometres over geologic time, whereas the sudden slip offsets that produce seismic waves may range from only several centimetres to tens of metres. In the 1976 Tangshan earthquake, for example, a surface strike-slip of about one metre was observed along the causative fault east of Beijing, and in the 1999 Taiwan earthquake the Chelung-pu fault slipped up to eight metres vertically.

Volcanism

A separate type of earthquake is associated with volcanic activity and is called a volcanic earthquake. Yet it is likely that even in such cases the disturbance is the result of a sudden slip of rock masses adjacent to the volcano and the consequent release of elastic strain energy. The stored energy, however, may in part be of hydrodynamic origin due to heat provided by magma moving in reservoirs beneath the volcano or to the release of gas under pressure.

There is a clear correspondence between the geographic distribution of volcanoes and major earthquakes, particularly in the Circum-Pacific Belt and along oceanic ridges. Volcanic vents, however, are generally several hundred kilometres from the epicentres of most major shallow earthquakes, and many earthquake sources occur nowhere near active volcanoes. Even in cases where an earthquake’s focus occurs directly below structures marked by volcanic vents, there is probably no immediate causal connection between the two activities; most likely both are the result of the same tectonic processes.

Artificial induction

Earthquakes are sometimes caused by human activities, including the injection of fluids into deep wells, the detonation of large underground nuclear explosions, the excavation of mines, and the filling of large reservoirs. In the case of deep mining, the removal of rock produces changes in the strain around the tunnels. Slip on adjacent, preexisting faults or outward shattering of rock into the new cavities may occur. In fluid injection, the slip is thought to be induced by premature release of elastic strain, as in the case of tectonic earthquakes, after fault surfaces are lubricated by the liquid. Large underground nuclear explosions have been known to produce slip on already strained faults in the vicinity of the test devices.

Reservoir induction

Of the various earthquake-causing activities cited above, the filling of large reservoirs is among the most important. More than 20 significant cases have been documented in which local seismicity has increased following the impounding of water behind high dams. Often, causality cannot be substantiated, because no data exists to allow comparison of earthquake occurrence before and after the reservoir was filled. Reservoir-induction effects are most marked for reservoirs exceeding 100 metres (330 feet) in depth and 1 cubic km (0.24 cubic mile) in volume. Three sites where such connections have very probably occurred are the Hoover Dam in the United States, the Aswan High Dam in Egypt, and the Kariba Dam on the border between Zimbabwe and Zambia. The most generally accepted explanation for earthquake occurrence in such cases assumes that rocks near the reservoir are already strained from regional tectonic forces to a point where nearby faults are almost ready to slip. Water in the reservoir adds a pressure perturbation that triggers the fault rupture. The pressure effect is perhaps enhanced by the fact that the rocks along the fault have lower strength because of increased water-pore pressure. These factors notwithstanding, the filling of most large reservoirs has not produced earthquakes large enough to be a hazard.

The specific seismic source mechanisms associated with reservoir induction have been established in a few cases. For the main shock at the Koyna Dam and Reservoir in India (1967), the evidence favours strike-slip faulting motion. At both the Kremasta Dam in Greece (1965) and the Kariba Dam in Zimbabwe-Zambia (1961), the generating mechanism was dip-slip on normal faults. By contrast, thrust mechanisms have been determined for sources of earthquakes at the lake behind Nurek Dam in Tajikistan. More than 1,800 earthquakes occurred during the first nine years after water was impounded in this 317-metre-deep reservoir in 1972, a rate amounting to four times the average number of shocks in the region prior to filling.

Seismology and nuclear explosions

In 1958 representatives from several countries, including the United States and the Soviet Union, met to discuss the technical basis for a nuclear test-ban treaty. Among the matters considered was the feasibility of developing effective means with which to detect underground nuclear explosions and to distinguish them seismically from earthquakes. After that conference, much special research was directed to seismology, leading to major advances in seismic signal detection and analysis.

Recent seismological work on treaty verification has involved using high-resolution seismographs in a worldwide network, estimating the yield of explosions, studying wave attenuation in the Earth, determining wave amplitude and frequency spectra discriminants, and applying seismic arrays. The findings of such research have shown that underground nuclear explosions, compared with natural earthquakes, usually generate seismic waves through the body of the Earth that are of much larger amplitude than the surface waves. This telltale difference along with other types of seismic evidence suggest that an international monitoring network of 270 seismographic stations could detect and locate all seismic events over the globe of magnitude 4 and above (corresponding to an explosive yield of about 100 tons of TNT).

Effects of earthquakes

Earthquakes have varied effects, including changes in geologic features, damage to man-made structures, and impact on human and animal life. Most of these effects occur on solid ground, but, since most earthquake foci are actually located under the ocean bottom, severe effects are often observed along the margins of oceans.

Surface phenomena

Earthquakes often cause dramatic geomorphological changes, including ground movements—either vertical or horizontal—along geologic fault traces; rising, dropping, and tilting of the ground surface; changes in the flow of groundwater; liquefaction of sandy ground; landslides; and mudflows. The investigation of topographic changes is aided by geodetic measurements, which are made systematically in a number of countries seriously affected by earthquakes.

Earthquakes can do significant damage to buildings, bridges, pipelines, railways, embankments, and other structures. The type and extent of damage inflicted are related to the strength of the ground motions and to the behaviour of the foundation soils. In the most intensely damaged region, called the meizoseismal area, the effects of a severe earthquake are usually complicated and depend on the topography and the nature of the surface materials. They are often more severe on soft alluvium and unconsolidated sediments than on hard rock. At distances of more than 100 km (60 miles) from the source, the main damage is caused by seismic waves traveling along the surface. In mines there is frequently little damage below depths of a few hundred metres even though the ground surface immediately above is considerably affected.

Earthquakes are frequently associated with reports of distinctive sounds and lights. The sounds are generally low-pitched and have been likened to the noise of an underground train passing through a station. The occurrence of such sounds is consistent with the passage of high-frequency seismic waves through the ground. Occasionally, luminous flashes, streamers, and bright balls have been reported in the night sky during earthquakes. These lights have been attributed to electric induction in the air along the earthquake source.

Tsunamis

Following certain earthquakes, very long-wavelength water waves in oceans or seas sweep inshore. More properly called seismic sea waves or tsunamis (tsunami is a Japanese word for “harbour wave”), they are commonly referred to as tidal waves, although the attractions of the Moon and Sun play no role in their formation. They sometimes come ashore to great heights—tens of metres above mean tide level—and may be extremely destructive.

The usual immediate cause of a tsunami is sudden displacement in a seabed sufficient to cause the sudden raising or lowering of a large body of water. This deformation may be the fault source of an earthquake, or it may be a submarine landslide arising from an earthquake. Large volcanic eruptions along shorelines, such as those of Thera (c. 1580 bc) and Krakatoa (ad 1883), have also produced notable tsunamis. The most destructive tsunami ever recorded occurred on December 26, 2004, after an earthquake displaced the seabed off the coast of Sumatra, Indonesia. More than 200,000 people were killed by a series of waves that flooded coasts from Indonesia to Sri Lanka and even washed ashore on the Horn of Africa.

Following the initial disturbance to the sea surface, water waves spread in all directions. Their speed of travel in deep water is given by the formula (√gh), where h is the sea depth and g is the acceleration of gravity. This speed may be considerable—100 metres per second (225 miles per hour) when h is 1,000 metres (3,300 feet). However, the amplitude (that is, the height of disturbance) at the water surface does not exceed a few metres in deep water, and the principal wavelength may be on the order of hundreds of kilometres; correspondingly, the principal wave period—that is, the time interval between arrival of successive crests—may be on the order of tens of minutes. Because of these features, tsunami waves are not noticed by ships far out at sea.

When tsunamis approach shallow water, however, the wave amplitude increases. The waves may occasionally reach a height of 20 to 30 metres above mean sea level in U- and V-shaped harbours and inlets. They characteristically do a great deal of damage in low-lying ground around such inlets. Frequently, the wave front in the inlet is nearly vertical, as in a tidal bore, and the speed of onrush may be on the order of 10 metres per second. In some cases there are several great waves separated by intervals of several minutes or more. The first of these waves is often preceded by an extraordinary recession of water from the shore, which may commence several minutes or even half an hour beforehand.

Organizations, notably in Japan, Siberia, Alaska, and Hawaii, have been set up to provide tsunami warnings. A key development is the Seismic Sea Wave Warning System, an internationally supported system designed to reduce loss of life in the Pacific Ocean. Centred in Honolulu, it issues alerts based on reports of earthquakes from circum-Pacific seismographic stations.

Seiches

Seiches are rhythmic motions of water in nearly landlocked bays or lakes that are sometimes induced by earthquakes and tsunamis. Oscillations of this sort may last for hours or even for a day or two.

The great Lisbon earthquake of 1755 caused the waters of canals and lakes in regions as far away as Scotland and Sweden to go into observable oscillations. Seiche surges in lakes in Texas, in the southwestern United States, commenced between 30 and 40 minutes after the 1964 Alaska earthquake, produced by seismic surface waves passing through the area.

A related effect is the result of seismic waves from an earthquake passing through the seawater following their refraction through the seafloor. The speed of these waves is about 1.5 km (0.9 mile) per second, the speed of sound in water. If such waves meet a ship with sufficient intensity, they give the impression that the ship has struck a submerged object. This phenomenon is called a seaquake.

Intensity and magnitude of earthquakes

Intensity scales

The violence of seismic shaking varies considerably over a single affected area. Because the entire range of observed effects is not capable of simple quantitative definition, the strength of the shaking is commonly estimated by reference to intensity scales that describe the effects in qualitative terms. Intensity scales date from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, before seismographs capable of accurate measurement of ground motion were developed. Since that time, the divisions in these scales have been associated with measurable accelerations of the local ground shaking. Intensity depends, however, in a complicated way not only on ground accelerations but also on the periods and other features of seismic waves, the distance of the measuring point from the source, and the local geologic structure. Furthermore, earthquake intensity, or strength, is distinct from earthquake magnitude, which is a measure of the amplitude, or size, of seismic waves as specified by a seismograph reading. See below Earthquake magnitude.

A number of different intensity scales have been set up during the past century and applied to both current and ancient destructive earthquakes. For many years the most widely used was a 10-point scale devised in 1878 by Michele Stefano de Rossi and Franƈois-Alphonse Forel. The scale now generally employed in North America is the Mercalli scale, as modified by Harry O. Wood and Frank Neumann in 1931, in which intensity is considered to be more suitably graded. A 12-point abridged form of the modified Mercalli scale is provided below. Modified Mercalli intensity VIII is roughly correlated with peak accelerations of about one-quarter that of gravity (g = 9.8 metres, or 32.2 feet, per second squared) and ground velocities of 20 cm (8 inches) per second. Alternative scales have been developed in both Japan and Europe for local conditions. The European (MSK) scale of 12 grades is similar to the abridged version of the Mercalli.

Modified Mercalli scale of earthquake intensity

1. Not felt. Marginal and long-period effects of large earthquakes.
2. Felt by persons at rest, on upper floors, or otherwise favourably placed to sense tremors.
3. Felt indoors. Hanging objects swing. Vibrations are similar to those caused by the passing of light trucks. Duration can be estimated.
4. Vibrations are similar to those caused by the passing of heavy trucks (or a jolt similar to that caused by a heavy ball striking the walls). Standing automobiles rock. Windows, dishes, doors rattle. Glasses clink, crockery clashes. In the upper range of grade IV, wooden walls and frames creak.
5. Felt outdoors; direction may be estimated. Sleepers awaken. Liquids are disturbed, some spilled. Small objects are displaced or upset. Doors swing, open, close. Pendulum clocks stop, start, change rate.
6. Felt by all; many are frightened and run outdoors. Persons walk unsteadily. Pictures fall off walls. Furniture moves or overturns. Weak plaster and masonry cracks. Small bells ring (church, school). Trees, bushes shake.
7. Difficult to stand. Noticed by drivers of automobiles. Hanging objects quivering. Furniture broken. Damage to weak masonry. Weak chimneys broken at roof line. Fall of plaster, loose bricks, stones, tiles, cornices. Waves on ponds; water turbid with mud. Small slides and caving along sand or gravel banks. Large bells ringing. Concrete irrigation ditches damaged.
8. Steering of automobiles affected. Damage to masonry; partial collapse. Some damage to reinforced masonry; none to reinforced masonry designed to resist lateral forces. Fall of stucco and some masonry walls. Twisting, fall of chimneys, factory stacks, monuments, towers, elevated tanks. Frame houses moved on foundations if not bolted down; loose panel walls thrown out. Decayed pilings broken off. Branches broken from trees. Changes in flow or temperature of springs and wells. Cracks in wet ground and on steep slopes.
9. General panic. Weak masonry destroyed; ordinary masonry heavily damaged, sometimes with complete collapse; reinforced masonry seriously damaged. Serious damage to reservoirs. Underground pipes broken. Conspicuous cracks in ground. In alluvial areas, sand and mud ejected; earthquake fountains, sand craters.
10. Most masonry and frame structures destroyed with their foundations. Some well-built wooden structures and bridges destroyed. Serious damage to dams, dikes, embankments. Large landslides. Water thrown on banks of canals, rivers, lakes, and so on. Sand and mud shifted horizontally on beaches and flat land. Railway rails bent slightly.
11. Rails bent greatly. Underground pipelines completely out of service.
12. Damage nearly total. Large rock masses displaced. Lines of sight and level distorted. Objects thrown into air.

With the use of an intensity scale, it is possible to summarize such data for an earthquake by constructing isoseismal curves, which are lines that connect points of equal intensity. If there were complete symmetry about the vertical through the earthquake’s focus, isoseismals would be circles with the epicentre (the point at the surface of the Earth immediately above where the earthquake originated) as the centre. However, because of the many unsymmetrical geologic factors influencing intensity, the curves are often far from circular. The most probable position of the epicentre is often assumed to be at a point inside the area of highest intensity. In some cases, instrumental data verify this calculation, but not infrequently the true epicentre lies outside the area of greatest intensity.

Earthquake magnitude

Earthquake magnitude is a measure of the “size,” or amplitude, of the seismic waves generated by an earthquake source and recorded by seismographs. (The types and nature of these waves are described in the section Seismic waves.) Because the size of earthquakes varies enormously, it is necessary for purposes of comparison to compress the range of wave amplitudes measured on seismograms by means of a mathematical device. In 1935 the American seismologist Charles F. Richter set up a magnitude scale of earthquakes as the logarithm to base 10 of the maximum seismic wave amplitude (in thousandths of a millimetre) recorded on a standard seismograph (the Wood-Anderson torsion pendulum seismograph) at a distance of 100 km (60 miles) from the earthquake epicentre. Reduction of amplitudes observed at various distances to the amplitudes expected at the standard distance of 100 km is made on the basis of empirical tables. Richter magnitudes M_L are computed on the assumption that the ratio of the maximum wave amplitudes at two given distances is the same for all earthquakes and is independent of azimuth.

Richter first applied his magnitude scale to shallow-focus earthquakes recorded within 600 km of the epicentre in the southern California region. Later, additional empirical tables were set up, whereby observations made at distant stations and on seismographs other than the standard type could be used. Empirical tables were extended to cover earthquakes of all significant focal depths and to enable independent magnitude estimates to be made from body- and surface-wave observations. A current form of the Richter scale is shown in the table.

At the present time a number of different magnitude scales are used by scientists and engineers as a measure of the relative size of an earthquake. The P-wave magnitude (M_b), for one, is defined in terms of the amplitude of the P wave recorded on a standard seismograph. Similarly, the surface-wave magnitude (M_s) is defined in terms of the logarithm of the maximum amplitude of ground motion for surface waves with a wave period of 20 seconds.

As defined, an earthquake magnitude scale has no lower or upper limit. Sensitive seismographs can record earthquakes with magnitudes of negative value and have recorded magnitudes up to about 9.0. (The 1906 San Francisco earthquake, for example, had a Richter magnitude of 8.25.)

A scientific weakness is that there is no direct mechanical basis for magnitude as defined above. Rather, it is an empirical parameter analogous to stellar magnitude assessed by astronomers. In modern practice a more soundly based mechanical measure of earthquake size is used—namely, the seismic moment (M₀). Such a parameter is related to the angular leverage of the forces that produce the slip on the causative fault. It can be calculated both from recorded seismic waves and from field measurements of the size of the fault rupture. Consequently, seismic moment provides a more uniform scale of earthquake size based on classical mechanics. This measure allows a more scientific magnitude to be used called moment magnitude (M_w). It is proportional to the logarithm of the seismic moment; values do not differ greatly from M_s values for moderate earthquakes. Given the above definitions, the great Alaska earthquake of 1964, with a Richter magnitude (M_L) of 8.3, also had the values M_s = 8.4, M₀ = 820 × 10²⁷ dyne centimetres, and M_w = 9.2.

Earthquake energy

Energy in an earthquake passing a particular surface site can be calculated directly from the recordings of seismic ground motion, given, for example, as ground velocity. Such recordings indicate an energy rate of 10⁵ watts per square metre (9,300 watts per square foot) near a moderate-size earthquake source. The total power output of a rupturing fault in a shallow earthquake is on the order of 10¹⁴ watts, compared with the 10⁵ watts generated in rocket motors.

The surface-wave magnitude M_s has also been connected with the surface energy E_s of an earthquake by empirical formulas. These give E_s = 6.3 × 10¹¹ and 1.4 × 10²⁵ ergs for earthquakes of M_s = 0 and 8.9, respectively. A unit increase in M_s corresponds to approximately a 32-fold increase in energy. Negative magnitudes M_s correspond to the smallest instrumentally recorded earthquakes, a magnitude of 1.5 to the smallest felt earthquakes, and one of 3.0 to any shock felt at a distance of up to 20 km (12 miles). Earthquakes of magnitude 5.0 cause light damage near the epicentre; those of 6.0 are destructive over a restricted area; and those of 7.5 are at the lower limit of major earthquakes.

The total annual energy released in all earthquakes is about 10²⁵ ergs, corresponding to a rate of work between 10 million and 100 million kilowatts. This is approximately one one-thousandth the annual amount of heat escaping from the Earth’s interior. Ninety percent of the total seismic energy comes from earthquakes of magnitude 7.0 and higher—that is, those whose energy is on the order of 10²³ ergs or more.

Frequency

There also are empirical relations for the frequencies of earthquakes of various magnitudes. Suppose N to be the average number of shocks per year for which the magnitude lies in a range about M_s. Thenlog₁₀ N = a − bM_s fits the data well both globally and for particular regions; for example, for shallow earthquakes worldwide, a = 6.7 and b = 0.9 when M_s > 6.0. The frequency for larger earthquakes therefore increases by a factor of about 10 when the magnitude is diminished by one unit. The increase in frequency with reduction in M_s falls short, however, of matching the decrease in the energy E. Thus, larger earthquakes are overwhelmingly responsible for most of the total seismic energy release. The number of earthquakes per year with M_b > 4.0 reaches 50,000.

Occurrence of earthquakes

Tectonic associations

Global seismicity patterns had no strong theoretical explanation until the dynamic model called plate tectonics was developed during the late 1960s. This theory holds that the Earth’s upper shell, or lithosphere, consists of nearly a dozen large, quasi-stable slabs called plates. The thickness of each of these plates is roughly 80 km (50 miles). The plates move horizontally relative to neighbouring plates at a rate of 1 to 10 cm (0.4 to 4 inches) per year over a shell of lesser strength called the asthenosphere. At the plate edges where there is contact between adjoining plates, boundary tectonic forces operate on the rocks, causing physical and chemical changes in them. New lithosphere is created at oceanic ridges by the upwelling and cooling of magma from the Earth’s mantle. The horizontally moving plates are believed to be absorbed at the ocean trenches, where a subduction process carries the lithosphere downward into the Earth’s interior. The total amount of lithospheric material destroyed at these subduction zones equals that generated at the ridges.

Seismological evidence (such as the location of major earthquake belts) is everywhere in agreement with this tectonic model. Earthquake sources are concentrated along the oceanic ridges, which correspond to divergent   plate boundaries. At the subduction zones, which are associated with convergent plate boundaries, intermediate- and deep-focus earthquakes mark the location of the upper part of a dipping lithosphere slab. The focal mechanisms indicate that the stresses are aligned with the dip of the lithosphere underneath the adjacent continent or island arc.

Some earthquakes associated with oceanic ridges are confined to strike-slip faults, called transform faults, that offset the ridge crests. The majority of the earthquakes occurring along such horizontal shear faults are characterized by slip motions. Also in agreement with the plate tectonics theory is the high seismicity encountered along the edges of plates where they slide past each other. Plate boundaries of this kind, sometimes called fracture zones, include the San Andreas Fault in California and the North Anatolian fault system in Turkey. Such plate boundaries are the site of interplate earthquakes of shallow focus.

The low seismicity within plates is consistent with the plate tectonic description. Small to large earthquakes do occur in limited regions well within the boundaries of plates; however, such intraplate seismic events can be explained by tectonic mechanisms other than plate boundary motions and their associated phenomena.

Shallow, intermediate, and deep foci

Most parts of the world experience at least occasional shallow earthquakes—those that originate within 60 km (40 miles) of the Earth’s outer surface. In fact, the great majority of earthquake foci are shallow. It should be noted, however, that the geographic distribution of smaller earthquakes is less completely determined than more severe quakes, partly because the availability of relevant data is dependent on the distribution of observatories.

Of the total energy released in earthquakes, 12 percent comes from intermediate earthquakes—that is, quakes with a focal depth ranging from about 60 to 300 km. About 3 percent of total energy comes from deeper earthquakes. The frequency of occurrence falls off rapidly with increasing focal depth in the intermediate range. Below intermediate depth the distribution is fairly uniform until the greatest focal depths, of about 700 km (430 miles), are approached.

The deeper-focus earthquakes commonly occur in patterns called Benioff zones that dip into the Earth, indicating the presence of a subducting slab. Dip angles of these slabs average about 45°, with some shallower and others nearly vertical. Benioff zones coincide with tectonically active island arcs such as Japan, Vanuatu, Tonga, and the Aleutians, and they are normally but not always associated with deep ocean trenches such as those along the South American Andes. Exceptions to this rule include Romania and the Hindu Kush mountain system. In most Benioff zones, intermediate- and deep-earthquake foci lie in a narrow layer, although recent precise hypocentral locations in Japan and elsewhere show two distinct parallel bands of foci 20 km apart.

Aftershocks, foreshocks, and swarms

Usually, a major or even moderate earthquake of shallow focus is followed by many lesser-size earthquakes close to the original source region. This is to be expected if the fault rupture producing a major earthquake does not relieve all the accumulated strain energy at once. In fact, this dislocation is liable to cause an increase in the stress and strain at a number of places in the vicinity of the focal region, bringing crustal rocks at certain points close to the stress at which fracture occurs. In some cases an earthquake may be followed by 1,000 or more aftershocks a day.

Sometimes a large earthquake is followed by a similar one along the same fault source within an hour or perhaps a day. An extreme case of this is multiple earthquakes. In most instances, however, the first principal earthquake of a series is much more severe than the aftershocks. In general, the number of aftershocks per day decreases with time. The aftershock frequency is roughly inversely proportional to the time since the occurrence of the largest earthquake of the series.

Most major earthquakes occur without detectable warning, but some principal earthquakes are preceded by foreshocks. In another common pattern, large numbers of small earthquakes may occur in a region for months without a major earthquake. In the Matsushiro region of Japan, for instance, there occurred between August 1965 and August 1967 a series of hundreds of thousands of earthquakes, some sufficiently strong (up to Richter magnitude 5) to cause property damage but no casualties. The maximum frequency was 6,780 small earthquakes on April 17, 1966. Such series of earthquakes are called earthquake swarms. Earthquakes associated with volcanic activity often occur in swarms, though swarms also have been observed in many nonvolcanic regions.

The study of earthquakes

Seismic waves

Principal types of seismic waves

Seismic waves generated by an earthquake source are commonly classified into three main types. The first two, the P (or primary) and S (or secondary) waves, propagate within the body of the Earth, while the third, consisting of Love and Rayleigh waves, propagates along its surface. (See figure.) The existence of these types of seismic waves was mathematically predicted during the 19th century, and modern comparisons show that there is a close correspondence between such theoretical calculations and actual measurements of the seismic waves.

The P seismic waves travel as elastic motions at the highest speeds. They are longitudinal waves that can be transmitted by both solid and liquid materials in the Earth’s interior. With P waves, the particles of the medium vibrate in a manner similar to sound waves—the transmitting media is alternately compressed and expanded. The slower type of body wave, the S wave, travels only through solid material. With S waves, the particle motion is transverse to the direction of travel and involves a shearing of the transmitting rock.

Because of their greater speed, P waves are the first to reach any point on the Earth’s surface. The first P-wave onset starts from the spot where an earthquake originates. This point, usually at some depth within the Earth, is called the focus, or hypocentre. The point at the surface immediately above the focus is known as the epicentre.

Love and Rayleigh waves are guided by the free surface of the Earth. They follow along after the P and S waves have passed through the body of the planet. Both Love and Rayleigh waves involve horizontal particle motion, but only the latter type has vertical ground displacements. As Love and Rayleigh waves travel, they disperse into long wave trains, and, at substantial distances from the source in alluvial basins, they cause much of the shaking felt during earthquakes.

Properties of seismic waves

At all distances from the focus, mechanical properties of the rocks, such as incompressibility, rigidity, and density, play a role in the speed with which the waves travel and the shape and duration of the wave trains. The layering of the rocks and the physical properties of surface soil also affect wave characteristics. In most cases, elastic behaviour occurs in earthquakes, but strong shaking of surface soils from the incident seismic waves sometimes results in nonelastic behaviour, including slumping (that is, the downward and outward movement of unconsolidated material) and the liquefaction of sandy soil.

When a seismic wave encounters a boundary that separates rocks of different elastic properties, it undergoes reflection and refraction. There is a special complication because conversion between the wave types usually also occurs at such a boundary: an incident P or S wave can yield reflected P and S waves and refracted P and S waves. Boundaries between structural layers also give rise to diffracted and scattered waves. These additional waves are in part responsible for the complications observed in ground motion during earthquakes. Modern research is concerned with computing synthetic records of ground motion that are realistic in comparison with observed ground shaking, using the theory of waves in complex structures.

The frequency range of seismic waves is large, from as high as the audible range (greater than 20 hertz) to as low as the frequencies of the free oscillations of the whole Earth, with the gravest period being 54 minutes (see below Long-period oscillations of the globe). Attenuation of the waves in rock imposes high-frequency limits, and in small to moderate earthquakes the dominant frequencies extend in surface waves from about 1 to 0.1 hertz.

The amplitude range of seismic waves is also great in most earthquakes. Displacement of the ground ranges from 10⁻¹⁰ to 10⁻¹ metre (4⁻¹² to 4 inches). In the greatest earthquakes the ground amplitude of the predominant P waves may be several centimetres at periods of two to five seconds. Very close to the seismic sources of great earthquakes, investigators have measured large wave amplitudes with accelerations of the ground exceeding that of gravity (9.8 metres, or 32.2 feet, per second squared) at high frequencies and ground displacements of 1 metre at low frequencies.

Measurement of seismic waves

Seismographs and accelerometers

Seismographs are used to measure ground motion in both earthquakes and microseisms (small oscillations described below). Most of these instruments are of the pendulum type. Early mechanical seismographs had a pendulum of large mass (up to several tons) and produced seismograms by scratching a line on smoked paper on a rotating drum. In later instruments, seismograms were recorded by means of a ray of light from the mirror of a galvanometer through which passed an electric current generated by electromagnetic induction when the pendulum of the seismograph moved. Technological developments in electronics have given rise to higher-precision pendulum seismometers and sensors of ground motion. In these instruments the electric voltages produced by motions of the pendulum or the equivalent are passed through electronic circuitry to amplify and digitize the ground motion for more exact readings.

Generally speaking, seismographs are divided into three types: short-period, long- (or intermediate-) period, and ultralong-period, or broadband, instruments. Short-period instruments are used to record P and S body waves with high magnification of the ground motion. For this purpose, the seismograph response is shaped to peak at a period of about one second or less. The intermediate-period instruments of the type used by the World-Wide Standardized Seismographic Network (described in the section Earthquake observatories) had a response maximum at about 20 seconds. Recently, in order to provide as much flexibility as possible for research work, the trend has been toward the operation of very broadband seismographs with digital representation of the signals. This is usually accomplished with very long-period pendulums and electronic amplifiers that pass signals in the band between 0.005 and 50 hertz.

When seismic waves close to their source are to be recorded, special design criteria are needed. Instrument sensitivity must ensure that the largest ground movements can be recorded without exceeding the upper scale limit of the device. For most seismological and engineering purposes the wave frequencies that must be recorded are higher than 1 hertz, and so the pendulum or its equivalent can be small. For this reason accelerometers that measure the rate at which the ground velocity is changing have an advantage for strong-motion recording. Integration is then performed to estimate ground velocity and displacement. The ground accelerations to be registered range up to two times that of gravity. Recording such accelerations can be accomplished mechanically with short torsion suspensions or force-balance mass-spring systems.

Because many strong-motion instruments need to be placed at unattended sites in ordinary buildings for periods of months or years before a strong earthquake occurs, they usually record only when a trigger mechanism is actuated with the onset of ground motion. Solid-state memories are now used, particularly with digital recording instruments, making it possible to preserve the first few seconds before the trigger starts the permanent recording and to store digitized signals on magnetic cassette tape or on a memory chip. In past design absolute timing was not provided on strong-motion records but only accurate relative time marks; the present trend, however, is to provide Universal Time (the local mean time of the prime meridian) by means of special radio receivers, small crystal clocks, or GPS (global positioning system) receivers from satellite clocks.

The prediction of strong ground motion and response of engineered structures in earthquakes depends critically on measurements of the spatial variability of earthquake intensities near the seismic wave source. In an effort to secure such measurements, special arrays of strong-motion seismographs have been installed in areas of high seismicity around the world. Large-aperture seismic arrays (linear dimensions on the order of 1 to 10 km, or 0.6 to 6 miles) of strong-motion accelerometers can now be used to improve estimations of speed, direction of propagation, and types of seismic wave components. Particularly important for full understanding of seismic wave patterns at the ground surface is measurement of the variation of wave motion with depth. To aid in this effort, special digitally recording seismometers have been installed in deep boreholes.

Ocean-bottom measurements

Because 70 percent of the Earth’s surface is covered by water, there is a need for ocean-bottom seismometers to augment the global land-based system of recording stations. Field tests have established the feasibility of extensive long-term recording by instruments on the seafloor. Japan already has a semipermanent seismograph system of this type that was placed on the seafloor off the Pacific coast of central Honshu in 1978 by means of a cable.

Because of the mechanical difficulties of maintaining permanent ocean-bottom instrumentation, different systems have been considered. They all involve placement of instruments on the bottom of the ocean, though they employ various mechanisms for data transmission. Signals may be transmitted to the ocean surface for retransmission by auxiliary apparatus or transmitted via cable to a shore-based station. Another system is designed to release its recording device automatically, allowing it to float to the surface for later recovery.

The use of ocean-bottom seismographs should yield much-improved global coverage of seismic waves and provide new information on the seismicity of oceanic regions. Ocean-bottom seismographs will enable investigators to determine the details of the crustal structure of the seafloor and, because of the relative thinness of the oceanic crust, should make it possible to collect clear seismic information about the upper mantle. Such systems are also expected to provide new data on plate boundaries, on the origin and propagation of microseisms, and on the nature of ocean-continent margins.

Measuring microseisms

Small ground motions known as microseisms are commonly recorded by seismographs. These weak wave motions are not generated by earthquakes, and they complicate accurate recording of the latter. However, they are of scientific interest because their form is related to the Earth’s surface structure.

Some microseisms have local causes—for example, those due to traffic or machinery or due to local wind effects, storms, and the action of rough surf against an extended steep coast. Another class of microseisms exhibits features that are very similar on records traced at earthquake observatories that are widely separated, including approximately simultaneous occurrence of maximum amplitudes and similar wave frequencies. These microseisms may persist for many hours and have more or less regular periods of about five to eight seconds. The largest amplitudes of such microseisms are on the order of 10⁻³ cm (0.0004 inch) and occur in coastal regions. The amplitudes also depend to some extent on local geologic structure. Some microseisms are produced when large standing water waves are formed far out at sea. The period of this type of microseism is half that of the standing wave.

Observation of earthquakes

Earthquake observatories

Worldwide during the late 1950s, there were only about 700 seismographic stations, which were equipped with seismographs of various types and frequency responses. Few instruments were calibrated; actual ground motions could not be measured, and timing errors of several seconds were common. The World-Wide Standardized Seismographic Network (WWSSN), the first modern worldwide standardized system, was established to help remedy this situation. Each station of the WWSSN had six seismographs—three short-period and three long-period seismographs. Timing and accuracy were maintained by crystal clocks, and a calibration pulse was placed daily on each record. By 1967 the WWSSN consisted of about 120 stations distributed over 60 countries. The resulting data provided the basis for significant advances in research on earthquake mechanisms, global tectonics, and the structure of the Earth’s interior.

By the 1980s a further upgrading of permanent seismographic stations began with the installation of digital equipment by a number of organizations. Among the global networks of digital seismographic stations now in operation are the Seismic Research Observatories in boreholes 100 metres (330 feet) deep and modified high-gain, long-period surface observatories. The Global Digital Seismographic Network in particular has remarkable capability, recording all motions from Earth tides to microscopic ground motions at the level of local ground noise. At present there are about 128 sites. With this system the long-term seismological goal will have been accomplished to equip global observatories with seismographs that can record every small earthquake anywhere over a broad band of frequencies.

Locating earthquake epicentres

Many observatories make provisional estimates of the epicentres of important earthquakes. These estimates provide preliminary information locally about particular earthquakes and serve as first approximations for the calculations subsequently made by large coordinating centres.

If an earthquake’s epicentre is less than 105° away from an observatory, the epicentre’s position can often be estimated from the readings of three seismograms recording perpendicular components of the ground motion. For a shallow earthquake the epicentral distance is indicated by the interval between the arrival times of P and S waves; the azimuth and angle of wave emergence at the surface are indicated by a comparison of the sizes and directions of the first movements shown in the seismograms and by the relative sizes of later waves, particularly surface waves. It should be noted, however, that in certain regions the first wave movement at a station arrives from a direction differing from the azimuth toward the epicentre. This anomaly is usually explained by strong variations in geologic structures.

When data from more than one observatory are available, an earthquake’s epicentre may be estimated from the times of travel of the P and S waves from source to recorder. In many seismically active regions, networks of seismographs with telemetry transmission and centralized timing and recording are common. Whether analog or digital recording is used, such integrated systems greatly simplify observatory work: multichannel signal displays make identification and timing of phase onsets easier and more reliable. Moreover, online microprocessors can be programmed to pick automatically, with some degree of confidence, the onset of a significant common phase, such as P, by correlation of waveforms from parallel network channels. With the aid of specially designed computer programs, seismologists can then locate distant earthquakes to within about 10 km (6 miles) and the epicentre of a local earthquake to within a few kilometres.

Catalogs of earthquakes felt by humans and of earthquake observations have appeared intermittently for many centuries. The earliest known list of instrumentally recorded earthquakes with computed times of origin and epicentres is for the period 1899–1903. In subsequent years, cataloging of earthquakes has become more uniform and complete. Especially valuable is the service provided by the International Seismological Centre (ISC) at Newbury, Eng. Each month it receives more than 1,000,000 readings from more than 2,000 stations worldwide and preliminary estimates of the locations of approximately 1,600 earthquakes from national and regional agencies and observatories. The ISC publishes a monthly bulletin—with about a two-year delay—that provides all available information on each of more than 5,000 earthquakes.

Various national and regional centres control networks of stations and act as intermediaries between individual stations and the international organizations. Examples of long-standing national centres include the Japan Meteorological Agency and United States National Earthquake Information Center in Colorado (a subdivision of the United States Geological Survey). These centres normally make estimates of the magnitudes, epicentres, origin times, and focal depths of local earthquakes. On the Internet, data on global seismicity is continually accessible through the Web site of the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS).

An important research technique is to infer the character of faulting in an earthquake from the recorded seismograms. For example, observed distributions of the directions of the first onsets in waves arriving at the Earth’s surface have been effectively used. Onsets are called “compressional” or “dilatational” according to whether the direction is away from or toward the focus, respectively. A polarity pattern becomes recognizable when the directions of the P-wave onsets are plotted on a map—there are broad areas in which the first onsets are predominantly compressions, separated from predominantly dilatational areas by nodal curves near which the P-wave amplitudes are abnormally small.

In 1926 the American geophysicist Perry E. Byerly used patterns of P onsets over the entire globe to infer the orientation of the fault plane in a large earthquake. The polarity method yields two P-nodal curves at the Earth’s surface; one curve is in the plane containing the assumed fault, and the other is in the plane (called the auxiliary plane) that passes through the focus and is perpendicular to the forces of the plane. The recent availability of worldwide broad-based digital recording has enabled computer programs to be written that estimate the fault mechanism and seismic moment from the complete pattern of seismic wave arrivals. Given a well-determined pattern at a number of earthquake observatories, it is possible to locate two planes, one of which is the plane containing the fault.

Earthquake prediction

Observation and interpretation of precursory phenomena

The search for periodic cycles in earthquake occurrence is an old one. Generally, periodicities in time and space for major earthquakes have not been widely detected or accepted. One problem is that long-term earthquake catalogs are not homogeneous in their selection and reporting. The most extensive catalog of this kind comes from China and begins about 700 bc. The catalog contains some information on about 1,000 destructive earthquakes. The sizes of these earthquakes have been assessed from the reports of damage, intensity, and shaking.

Another approach to the statistical occurrence of earthquakes involves the postulation of trigger forces that initiate the rupture. Such forces have been attributed to severe weather conditions, volcanic activity, and tidal forces, for example. Usually correlations are made between the physical phenomena assumed to provide the trigger and the repetition of earthquakes. Inquiry must always be made to discover whether a causative link is actually present, but in no cases to the present has a trigger mechanism, at least for moderate to large earthquakes, been unequivocally found that satisfies the various necessary criteria.

Statistical methods also have been tried with populations of regional earthquakes. It has been suggested, but never established generally, that the slope b of the regression line between the logarithm of the number of earthquakes and the magnitude for a region may change characteristically with time. Specifically, the claim is that the b value for the population of foreshocks of a major earthquake may be significantly smaller than the mean b value for the region averaged over a long interval of time.

The elastic rebound theory of earthquake sources allows rough prediction of the occurrence of large shallow earthquakes. Harry F. Reid gave, for example, a crude forecast of the next great earthquake near San Francisco. (The theory also predicted, of course, that the place would be along the San Andreas or an associated fault.) The geodetic data indicated that during an interval of 50 years relative displacements of 3.2 metres (10.5 feet) had occurred at distant points across the fault. The maximum elastic-rebound offset along the fault in the 1906 earthquake was 6.5 metres. Therefore, (6.5 ÷ 3.2) × 50, or about 100, years would again elapse before sufficient strain accumulated for the occurrence of an earthquake comparable to that of 1906. The premises are that the regional strain will grow uniformly and that various constraints have not been altered by the great 1906 rupture itself (such as by the onset of slow fault slip). Such strain rates are now being more adequately measured along a number of active faults such as the San Andreas, using networks of GPS sensors.

For many years prediction research has been influenced by the basic argument that strain accumulates in the rock masses in the vicinity of a fault and results in crustal deformation. Deformations have been measured in the horizontal direction along active faults (by trilateration and triangulation) and in the vertical direction by precise leveling and tiltmeters. Some investigators believe that changes in groundwater level occur prior to earthquakes; variations of this sort have been reported mainly from China. Because water levels in wells respond to a complex array of factors such as rainfall, such factors will have to be removed if changes in water level are to be studied in relation to earthquakes.

The theory of dilatancy (that is, an increase in volume) of rock prior to rupture once occupied a central position in discussions of premonitory phenomena of earthquakes, but it now receives less support. It is based on the observation that many solids exhibit dilatancy during deformation. For earthquake prediction the significance of dilatancy, if real, is in its effects on various measurable quantities of the Earth’s crust, such as seismic velocities, electric resistivity, and ground and water levels.

The best-studied consequence is the effect on seismic velocities. The influence of internal cracks and pores on the elastic properties of rocks can be clearly demonstrated in laboratory measurements of those properties as a function of hydrostatic pressure. In the case of saturated rocks, experiments predict—for shallow earthquakes—that dilatancy occurs as a portion of the crust is stressed to failure, causing a decrease in the velocities of seismic waves. Recovery of velocity is brought about by subsequent rise of the pore pressure of water, which also has the effect of weakening the rock and enhancing fault slip.

Strain buildup in the focal region may have measurable effects on other observable properties, including electrical conductivity and gas concentration. Because the electrical conductivity of rocks depends largely on interconnected water channels within the rocks, resistivity may increase before the cracks become saturated. As pore fluid is expelled from the closing cracks, the local water table would rise and concentrations of gases such as radioactive radon would increase. No unequivocal confirming measurements have yet been published.

Geologic methods of extending the seismicity record back from the present also are being explored. Field studies indicate that the sequence of surface ruptures along major active faults associated with large earthquakes can sometimes be constructed. An example is the series of large earthquakes in Turkey in the 20th century, which were caused mainly by successive westward ruptures of the North Anatolian Fault. Liquefaction effects preserved in beds of sand and peat have provided evidence—when radiometric dating methods are used—for large paleoearthquakes extending back for more than 1,000 years in many seismically active zones, including the Pacific Northwest coast of the United States.

Less well-grounded precursory phenomena, particularly earthquake lights and animal behaviour, sometimes draw more public attention than the precursors discussed above. Many reports of unusual lights in the sky and abnormal animal behaviour preceding earthquakes are known to seismologists, mostly in anecdotal form. Both these phenomena are usually explained in terms of a release of gases prior to earthquakes and electric and acoustic stimuli of various types. At present there is no definitive experimental evidence to support claims that animals sometimes sense the coming of an earthquake.

Methods of reducing earthquake hazards

Considerable work has been done in seismology to explain the characteristics of the recorded ground motions in earthquakes. Such knowledge is needed to predict ground motions in future earthquakes so that earthquake-resistant structures can be designed. Although earthquakes cause death and destruction through such secondary effects as landslides, tsunamis, fires, and fault rupture, the greatest losses—both of lives and of property—result from the collapse of man-made structures during the violent shaking of the ground. Accordingly, the most effective way to mitigate the damage of earthquakes from an engineering standpoint is to design and construct structures capable of withstanding strong ground motions.

Interpreting recorded ground motions

Most elastic waves recorded close to an extended fault source are complicated and difficult to interpret uniquely. Understanding such near-source motion can be viewed as a three-part problem. The first part stems from the generation of elastic waves by the slipping fault as the moving rupture sweeps out an area of slip along the fault plane within a given time. The pattern of waves produced is dependent on several parameters, such as fault dimension and rupture velocity. Elastic waves of various types radiate from the vicinity of the moving rupture in all directions. The geometry and frictional properties of the fault critically affect the pattern of radiation from it.

The second part of the problem concerns the passage of the waves through the intervening rocks to the site and the effect of geologic conditions. The third part involves the conditions at the recording site itself, such as topography and highly attenuating soils. All these questions must be considered when estimating likely earthquake effects at a site of any proposed structure.

Experience has shown that the ground strong-motion recordings have a variable pattern in detail but predictable regular shapes in general (except in the case of strong multiple earthquakes). In a strong horizontal shaking of the ground near the fault source, there is an initial segment of motion made up mainly of P waves, which frequently manifest themselves strongly in the vertical motion. This is followed by the onset of S waves, often associated with a longer-period pulse of ground velocity and displacement related to the near-site fault slip or fling. This pulse is often enhanced in the direction of the fault rupture and normal to it. After the S onset there is shaking that consists of a mixture of S and P waves, but the S motions become dominant as the duration increases. Later, in the horizontal component, surface waves dominate, mixed with some S body waves. Depending on the distance of the site from the fault and the structure of the intervening rocks and soils, surface waves are spread out into long trains.

Constructing seismic hazard maps

In many regions, seismic expectancy maps or hazard maps are now available for planning purposes. The anticipated intensity of ground shaking is represented by a number called the peak acceleration or the peak velocity.

To avoid weaknesses found in earlier earthquake hazard maps, the following general principles are usually adopted today:

1. The map should take into account not only the size but also the frequency of earthquakes.
2. The broad regionalization pattern should use historical seismicity as a database, including the following factors: major tectonic trends, acceleration attenuation curves, and intensity reports.
3. Regionalization should be defined by means of contour lines with design parameters referred to ordered numbers on neighbouring contour lines (this procedure minimizes sensitivity concerning the exact location of boundary lines between separate zones).
4. The map should be simple and not attempt to microzone the region.
5. The mapped contoured surface should not contain discontinuities, so that the level of hazard progresses gradually and in order across any profile drawn on the map.

Developing resistant structures

Developing engineered structural designs that are able to resist the forces generated by seismic waves can be achieved either by following building codes based on hazard maps or by appropriate methods of analysis. Many countries reserve theoretical structural analyses for the larger, more costly, or critical buildings to be constructed in the most seismically active regions, while simply requiring that ordinary structures conform to local building codes. Economic realities usually determine the goal, not of preventing all damage in all earthquakes but of minimizing damage in moderate, more common earthquakes and ensuring no major collapse at the strongest intensities. An essential part of what goes into engineering decisions on design and into the development and revision of earthquake-resistant design codes is therefore seismological, involving measurement of strong seismic waves, field studies of intensity and damage, and the probability of earthquake occurrence.

Earthquake risk can also be reduced by rapid post-earthquake response. Strong-motion accelerographs have been connected in some urban areas, such as Los Angeles, Tokyo, and Mexico City, to interactive computers. The recorded waves are correlated with seismic intensity scales and rapidly displayed graphically on regional maps via the World Wide Web.

Exploration of the Earth’s interior with seismic waves

Seismological tomography

Seismological data on the Earth’s deep structure come from several sources. These include P and S waves in earthquakes and nuclear explosions, the dispersion of surface waves from distant earthquakes, and vibrations of the whole Earth from large earthquakes.

One of the major aims of seismology is to infer the minimum set of properties of the Earth’s interior that will explain recorded seismic wave trains in detail. Notwithstanding the tremendous progress made in the exploration of the Earth’s deep structure during the first half of the 20th century, realization of this goal was severely limited until the 1960s because of the laborious effort required to evaluate theoretical models and to process the large amounts of earthquake data recorded. The application of high-speed computers with their enormous storage and rapid retrieval capabilities opened the way for major advances in both theoretical work and data handling.

Since the mid-1970s, researchers have studied realistic models of the Earth’s structure that include continental and oceanic boundaries, mountains, and river valleys rather than simple structures such as those involving variation only with depth. In addition, various technical developments have benefited observational seismology. For example, the implications of seismic exploratory techniques developed by the petroleum industry (such as seismic reflection) have been recognized and the procedures adopted. Equally significant has been the application of three-dimensional imaging methods to the exploration of the Earth’s deep structure. This has been made possible by the development of very fast microprocessors and computers with peripheral display equipment.

The major method for determining the structure of the Earth’s deep interior is the detailed analysis of seismograms of seismic waves. (Such earthquake readings also provide estimates of wave velocities, density, and elastic and inelastic parameters in the Earth.) The primary procedure is to measure the travel times of various wave types, such as P and S, from their source to the recording seismograph. First, however, identification of each wave type with its ray path through the Earth must be made.

An especially important class of rays is associated with a discontinuity surface separating the central core of the Earth from the mantle at a depth of about 2,900 km (1,800 miles) below the outer surface. The symbol c is used to indicate an upward reflection at this discontinuity. Thus, if a P wave travels down from a focus to the discontinuity surface in question, the upward reflection into an S wave is recorded at an observing station as the ray PcS and similarly with PcP, ScS, and ScP. The symbol K is used to denote the part (of P type) of the path of a wave that passes through the liquid central core. Thus, the ray SKS corresponds to a wave that starts as an S wave, is refracted into the central core as a P wave, and is refracted back into the mantle, wherein it finally emerges as an S wave. Such rays as SKKS correspond to waves that have suffered an internal reflection at the boundary of the central core.

The discovery of the existence of an inner core in 1936 by the Danish seismologist Inge Lehmann made it necessary to introduce additional basic symbols. For paths of waves inside the central core, the symbols i and I are used analogously to c and K for the whole Earth; therefore, i indicates reflection upward at the boundary between the outer and inner portions of the central core, and I corresponds to the part (of P type) of the path of a wave that lies inside the inner portion. Thus, for instance, discrimination needs to be made between the rays PKP, PKiKP, and PKIKP. The first of these corresponds to a wave that has entered the outer part of the central core but has not reached the inner core, the second to one that has been reflected upward at the inner core boundary, and the third to one that has penetrated into the inner portion.

By combining the symbols p, s, P, S, c, K, i, and I in various ways, notation is developed for all the main rays associated with body earthquake waves. The symbol J has been introduced to correspond to S waves in the inner core, should evidence ever be found for such waves.

Finally, the use of times of travel along rays to infer hidden structure is analogous to the use of X-rays in medical tomography. The method involves reconstructing an image of internal anomalies from measurements made at the outer surface. Nowadays, hundreds of thousands of travel times of P and S waves are available in earthquake catalogs for the tomographic imaging of the Earth’s interior and the mapping of internal structure.

Structure of the Earth’s interior

Studies with earthquake recordings have given a picture inside the Earth of a solid but layered and flow-patterned mantle about 2,900 km (1,800 miles) thick, which in places lies within 10 km (6 miles) of the surface under the oceans.

The thin surface rock layer surrounding the mantle is the crust, whose lower boundary is called the Mohorovičić discontinuity. In normal continental regions the crust is about 30 to 40 km thick; there is usually a superficial low-velocity sedimentary layer underlain by a zone in which seismic velocity increases with depth. Beneath this zone there is a layer in which P-wave velocities in some places fall from 6 to 5.6 km per second. The middle part of the crust is characterized by a heterogeneous zone with P velocities of nearly 6 to 6.3 km per second. The lowest layer of the crust (about 10 km thick) has significantly higher P velocities, ranging up to nearly 7 km per second.

In the deep ocean there is a sedimentary layer that is about 1 km thick. Underneath is the lower layer of the oceanic crust, which is about 4 km thick. This layer is inferred to consist of basalt that formed where extrusions of basaltic magma at oceanic ridges have been added to the upper part of lithospheric plates as they spread away from the ridge crests. This crustal layer cools as it moves away from the ridge crest, and its seismic velocities increase correspondingly.

Below the mantle lies a shell that is 2,255 km thick, which seismic waves show to have the properties of a liquid. At the very centre of the planet is a separate solid core with a radius of 1,216 km. Recent work with observed seismic waves has revealed three-dimensional structural details inside the Earth, especially in the crust and lithosphere, under the subduction zones, at the base of the mantle, and in the inner core. These regional variations are important in explaining the dynamic history of the planet.

Long-period oscillations of the globe

Sometimes earthquakes are large enough to cause the whole Earth to ring like a bell. The deepest tone of vibration of the planet is one with a period (the length of time between the arrival of successive crests in a wave train) of 54 minutes. Knowledge of these vibrations has come from a remarkable extension in the range of periods of ground movements that can be recorded by modern digital long-period seismographs that span the entire allowable spectrum of earthquake wave periods: from ordinary P waves with periods of tenths of seconds to vibrations with periods on the order of 12 and 24 hours such as those that occur in Earth tidal movements.

The measurements of vibrations of the whole Earth provide important information on the properties of the interior of the planet. It should be emphasized that these free vibrations are set up by the energy release of the earthquake source but continue for many hours and sometimes even days. For an elastic sphere such as the Earth, two types of vibrations are known to be possible. In one type, called S modes, or spheroidal vibrations, the motions of the elements of the sphere have components along the radius as well as along the tangent. In the second type, which are designated as T modes, or torsional vibrations, there is shear but no radial displacements. The nomenclature is _nS_l and _nT_l, where the letters n and l are related to the surfaces in the vibration at which there is zero motion.

Several hundred types of S and T vibrations have been identified and the associated periods measured. The amplitudes of the ground motion in the vibrations have been determined for particular earthquakes, and, more important, the attenuation of each component vibration has been measured. The dimensionless measure of this decay constant is called the quality factor Q. The greater the value of Q, the less the wave or vibration damping. Typically, for _oS₁₀ and _oT₁₀, the Q values are about 250.

The rate of decay of the vibrations of the whole Earth with the passage of time, where they appear superimposed for 20 hours of the 12-hour tidal deformations of the Earth. At the bottom of the figure these vibrations have been split up into a series of peaks, each with a definite frequency, similar to that of the spectrum of light. Such a spectrum indicates the relative amplitude of each harmonic present in the free oscillations. If the physical properties of the Earth’s interior were known, all these individual peaks could be calculated directly. Instead, the internal structure must be estimated from the observed peaks.

Recent research has shown that observations of long-period oscillations of the Earth discriminate fairly finely between different Earth models. In applying the observations to improve the resolution and precision of such representations of the planet’s internal structure, a considerable number of Earth models are set up, and all the periods of their free oscillations are computed and checked against the observations. Models can then be successively eliminated until only a small range remains. In practice, the work starts with existing models; efforts are made to amend them by sequential steps until full compatibility with the observations is achieved, within the uncertainties of the observations. Even so, the resulting computed Earth structure is not a unique solution to the problem.

Extraterrestrial seismic phenomena

Space vehicles have carried equipment to the surface of the Moon and Mars with which to record seismic waves, and seismologists on Earth have received telemetered signals from seismic events in both cases.

By 1969, seismographs had been placed at six sites on the Moon during the U.S. Apollo missions. Recording of seismic data ceased in September 1977. The instruments detected between 600 and 3,000 moonquakes during each year of their operation, though most of these seismic events were very small. The ground noise on the lunar surface is low compared with that of the Earth, so that the seismographs could be operated at very high magnifications. Because there was more than one station on the Moon, it was possible to use the arrival times of P and S waves at the lunar stations from the moonquakes to determine foci in the same way as is done on the Earth.

Moonquakes are of three types. First, there are the events caused by the impact of lunar modules, booster rockets, and meteorites. The lunar seismograph stations were able to detect meteorites hitting the Moon’s surface more than 1,000 km (600 miles) away. The two other types of moonquakes had natural sources in the Moon’s interior: they presumably resulted from rock fracturing, as on Earth. The most common type of natural moonquake had deep foci, at depths of 600 to 1,000 km; the less common variety had shallow focal depths.

Seismological research on Mars has been less successful. Only one of the seismometers carried to the Martian surface by the U.S. Viking landers during the mid-1970s remained operational, and only one potential marsquake was detected in 546 Martian days.

Courtesy: Britannica Encyclopedia

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The  Supreme Court  of India on  07.05.2010  held  that  a Governor  cannot  be  removed on  the  ground  that  he/ she  is out  of  sync  with  the  policies and  ideologies  of  the  Union government  or  the  party  in power  at  the  Centre.   Nor  can he/ she  be  removed  on  the ground  that  the  Union  government  has  lost  confidence in  him/ her.

A five- judge Constitution Benchof the Supreme Court of India,   comprising Chief Justice K. G.   Balakrishnan and Justices S. H.   Kapadia,   R. V. Raveendran,   B.   Sudershan Reddy and P.   Sathasivam  was disposing  of  a  petition  filed  by the  former  Member  of  Parliament,   B. P.   Singhal.

The  Bench  said  that  as  a Governor  was  neither  an  employee  nor  agent  of  the  Union government,   it  was  rejecting the  contention  that  a  Governor  could  be  removed  if  the Union  government  or  the party  in  power  lost  ‘ confidence’   in  him.

It  held  that  a  change  in  government  at  the  Centre  was not  a  ground  for  removal  of Governors  to  make  way  for others  favoured  by  the  new government.

Writing  the  judgment,   Justice  Raveendran  said,   “ What Article  156  ( 1)   of  the  Constitution            [ under  which  a  Governor  holds  office  during  the pleasure  of  the  President] dispenses  with  is  the  need  to assign  reasons  or  the  need  to give  notice,   but  the  need  to act  fairly  and  reasonably  cannot  be  dispensed  with  by  Article  156( 1).”

The  Bench  said: “ The  President,   in  exercising  power  under  Article  156 ( 1),   should  act  in  a  manner that  is  not  arbitrary  or  unreasonable.   In  the  event  of challenge  of  withdrawal  of the  pleasure,   the  court  will necessarily  assume  that  it  is for  compelling  reasons.   Consequently,   where  the  aggrieved  person  is  not  able  to establish  a prima  facie instance  of  arbitrariness  or  mala  fides  in  his  removal,   the court  will  refuse  to  interfere.

“ However,   where  a prima facie case  of  arbitrariness  or mala  fides  is  made  out,   the court  can  require  the  Union government  to  produce  records/ material  to  satisfy  itself  that  the  withdrawal  of pleasure  was  for  good  and compelling  reasons.   What constitutes  good  and  compelling  reasons  would  depend upon  the  facts  of  the  case. Having  regard  to  the  nature of  functions  of  the  Governor in  maintaining  Centre- State relations,   and  the  flexibility available  to  the  government in  such  matters,   it  is  needless to  say  that  there  will  be  no interference  unless  a  very strong  case  is  made  out.”

The  court  said  if  the  aggrieved  person  was  able  to demonstrate prima  facie that his  or  her  removal  was  arbitrary,   mala  fide,   capricious  or whimsical,   it  would  call  upon the  Union  government  to  disclose  to  it  the  material  upon which  the  President  took  the decision  to  withdraw  the pleasure.

If  the  government  did  not disclose  any  reason,   or  if  the reasons  disclosed  were  found to  be  irrelevant,   arbitrary, whimsical,   or  mala  fide,   it would  interfere  in  such  a  decision.

The  Bench  said: “ In  the  early  days  of  Indian democracy,   the  same  political party  was  in  power  both  at  the Centre  and  the  States.   The position has changed with passage of time.   Now  different  political  parties,   some  national  and  some  regional,   are in  power  in  the  States.   Further  one  single  party  may  not be  in  power  either  in  the  Centre  or  in  the  State.   Different parties with distinct ideologies may constitute a front,   to form a government.

“ On  account  of  emergence of  coalition  politics,   many  regional  parties  have  started sharing  power  in  the  Centre. Many  a  time  there  may  not even  be  a  common  programme,   manifesto  or  agenda among  the  parties  sharing power.   As  a  result,   the  agenda or  ideology  of  a  political  party in  power  in  the  State  may  not be  in  sync  with  the  agenda  or ideology  of  the  political  parties  in  the  ruling  coalition  at the  Centre,   or  may  not  be  in sync  with  the  agenda  or  ideology  of  some  of  the  political parties  in  the  ruling  coalition at  the  Centre,   but  may  be  in sync  with  some  other  political  parties  forming  part  of  the ruling  coalition  at  the  Centre.

“ Further,   the  compulsions of  coalition  politics  may  require  the  parties  sharing power  to  frequently  change their  policies  and  agendas.   In such  a  scenario  of  myriad  policies,   ideologies,   agendas  in the  shifting  sands  of  political coalitions,   there  is  no  question  of  the  Union  government having  Governors  who  are  in sync  with  its  mandate  and policies.   Governors  are  not expected  or  required  to  implement  the  policies  of  the government  or  popular  mandates.   Their constitutional role is clearly defined and bears very limited political overtones.

“ Reputed  elder  statesmen, able  administrators  and  eminent  personalities,   with  maturity  and  experience  are expected  to  be  appointed  as Governors.   While  some  of them  may  come  from  a  political  background,   once  they  are appointed  as  Governors,   they owe  their  allegiance  and  loyalty  to  the  Constitution  and not  to  any  political  party  and are  required  to  preserve,   protect  and  defend  the  Constitution.

“ We,   therefore,   reject  the contention  of  the  respondents  that  Governors  should be  in  “ sync”   with  the  policies of  the  Union  government  or should  subscribe  to  the  ideology  of  the  party  in  power  at the  Centre.   As  the  Governor is  neither  the  employee  nor the  agent  of  the  Union  government,   we  also  reject  the contention  that  a  Governor can  be  removed  if  the  Union government  or  party  in  power loses  ‘ confidence’   in  him.”

The  Bench  noted  that  persons  of  calibre,   experience, and  distinction  “ are  chosen  to fill  these  posts.   Such  persons are  chosen  not  to  enable  them to  earn  their  livelihood  but  to serve  society.   It  is  wrong  to assume  that  such  persons having  been  chosen  on  account  of  their  stature,   maturity  and  experience  will  be demoralised  or  be  in  constant fear  of  removal,   unless  there is  security  of  tenure.   The  doctrine  of  pleasure  is  not  a  licence  to  act  with  unfettered discretion  to  act  arbitrarily, whimsically,   or  capriciously.”

A comprehensive report on the cryogenic engine launch in India, to help you understand this space program that has enormous implications for our progress.

April 16, 2010 was a significant day for India. It was the day India launched its first domestically built cryogenic engine recently from Sriharikota. India is an emerging space power and has been designing and building rockets for an ambitious space program. But the stars were in not in India’s favour. The rocket launch using a domestically built cryogenic engine recently from Sriharikota in southern India was an attempt to demonstrate India’s mastery of a complex technology. The technology of Cryogenic engines are rocket motors designed for fuels that have to be maintained  at very low temperatures to   make it possible for  launching  heavy satellites into space. To the disappointment of hopeful Indian scientists the rocket veered off its path eight minutes after takeoff and plunged into the Bay of Bengal.

The failed attempt of India’s ambitious venture to master a technology needed to launch heavy satellites into space could create a setback for the country’s hopes of getting a bigger share in the multi -billion dollar global satellite launch arena, according to news sources. According to news sources, the chairman of the Indian Space Research Organization, K. Radhakrishnan said that the rocket, when it started tumbling indicated loss of control in the vehicle. But this will not deter Indian scientists from continuing their efforts in perfecting the technology in the next one year. India has spent nearly 20 years on the development of the cryogenic engine model. This restricted technology has so far been the possession of nations like Russia, United States of America, France, Japan and China.
India got an entry in the lucrative market of the several billion dollar commercial space satellite launch business, when it launched a small Italian satellite into space in 2007.  But the dependence of India on cryogenic engines that are Russian- made has impeded India’s growth in the technology, and motivated Indian scientists to independently develop the said technology. The goal of space scientists of India is to offer satellite launch services at more economically lower priced rates as compared to nations of the West. By doing so, according to news sources India hopes to expand this business to nearly $120 dollars annually. The cryogenic program, which scientists have been working on since 1994, cost around Rs.335 crore.

In Thiruvanandapuram, the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre and the Liquid System Propulsion System in Mahendragiri led this project. The GSAT-4 mission, a 2,200 kg experimental satellite, carries a navigation payload that offers navigation possibilities that are improved for civil aircraft as well. The ISRO is collaborating with the Airports Authority of India with Gagan, the GPS-aided navigation system. A noteworthy experiment on the mission is the utilization of a regenerative transponder payload that operates using the advanced Ka frequency band, which scientists say is an advance in the field of communications technology since it enables smaller ground terminals at the user end and will aid in increasing productivity of existing resources, according to news reports.

Cryogenic technology involves the use of rocket propellants at extremely low temperatures. The combination of liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen offers the highest energy efficiency for rocket engines that need to produce large amounts of thrust. But oxygen remains a liquid only at temperatures below minus 183⁰ Celsius and hydrogen at below minus 253⁰CelsiusTo build a rocket engine like that   runs on such propellants means overcoming engineering challenges. USA pioneered the development of cryogenic engines and their Centaur upper stage, equipped with RL-10 engines successfully flew their first flight in 1963.It is still used on the Atlas V rocket.

The J-2 engine that powered the upper stages of the powerful Saturn V rocket that put humans on the Moon was accomplished because of America’s mastery of the cryogenic technology. ISRO recognized the importance of cryogenic technology fairly early. Other nations like Russia, Japan, China and France did similar launches. In December 1982, six months after the PSLV project was cleared, a Cryogenic Study Team was started, but the ISRO went through a long period of trying to decide on whether to buy the technology or develop it independently. Getting the technology from other nations would greatly reduce the time that would otherwise be needed was a case in point.U.S, France and Japan reportedly could not provide the technology to India because of the high cost. At last, in January 1991, India signed a deal with Glavkosmos, a Russian manufacturer to purchase two cryogenic flight stages and the technology needed to make them in India. The 11D56 cryogenic engine had been developed for one of the upper stages of the mammoth N1 rocket, the Soviet equivalent of Saturn V. But after four launch failures in succession, the N1 project was shelved.  News sources say that according, to the Indo-Soviet deal; ISRO would get a stage built around the 11D56 cryogenic engine that could produce 7.5 tonnes of thrust. The stage would carry 12 tonnes of propellant, but later Russia backed away from the deal since the said deal was a violation of the Missile Technology Control Regime.

April 1994

Thus the ISRO decided to develop the technology independently. The Indian cryogenic engine is produced by Godrej and the Hyderabad-based MTAR Technologies working together as a team industry, the early prototypes were built by them as opposed to the ISRO initially mastering and then transferring the technology. The space agency had to make sure that these companies succeeded because failure was no option.

April 15, 2010

According to news sources, the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) eagerly anticipated this flight as for the first time it was flying a GSLV with its own cryogenic engine. The Mission Control Centre at the Sriharikota spaceport was down in the doldrums as realization of the failed mission set in.  For more than 17 years the ISRO had labored hard to develop its own cryogenic engine. The earlier five GSLV flights from 2001 to 2007 were powered by Russian cryogenic engines.  According to news sources ISRO Chairman K. Radhakrishnan told reporters, that the team was not sure if the cryogenic main engine successfully ignited and that after examining   different parameters that were monitored during the flight they would confirm if the engine did ignite at all. The vehicle tumbled indicating loss of its control and altitude which led to it splashing into the sea.

The failure of the GSLV-D3 mission will not have an impact on The Chandrayaan-2 mission which is set for 2013. According to the ISRO’s plans, a GSLV powered by an indigenous cryogenic engine will put Chandrayaan-2 in orbit. The GSLV-D3 mission had three objectives:

• To develop and launch an indigenous cryogenic stage with the engine and associated systems.
• To evaluate the performance of the indigenous cryogenic stage and engine.
• To launch the communication satellite GSAT-4 into orbit.

Of these three goals only the first objective seems to have been realized, as observed by the ISRO Chairman, K.Radhakrishnan.

Cryogenic technology is the most complex of all types of rocket propulsion. France and the U.S. had also met with failures in using cryogenic engines. According to Mr.Ramakrishnan, Director (Projects), Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, Thiruvanandapuram failures in cryogenic technology are not unusual because it is difficult to test the cryogenic engine even on the ground. Though it is disappointing he said India will keep trying, according to news reports.

Detailed investigations and analysis of the flight data are being carried out to find out the exact reasons for the failure and to take corrective steps to realize the next flight test of the indigenous Cryogenic Engine and Stage within the next one year.

Dream Dare Win

www.jeywin.com
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