The view from Google Earth: Water

Google Earth does not take pictures of the oceans. But the rivers, lakes and coasts are fascinating enough.

Here are the meanders in a small tributary of the Amazon. Meanders are characteristic of rivers which are leisurely flowing through a floodplain and depositing sediment along the way.

Here are meanders in lake Powell in Arizona, US. After the Glen Canyon dam was built, the Colorado river backed up and filled up these meanders which will remain static and unchanging.

Here is Majuli: a river island in Brahmaputra river in India --very close to my hometown Jorhat. Note the extensive braiding pattern on the river. Before entering Assam, the Brahmaputra flows through a very steep canyon and hence carries an extensive load of sediment. This sediment is deposited on the floodplains of Assam and the sediment causes the river to subdivide into many streams which fork and rejoin leaving small islands in the middle.
The sediment deposited by the Brahmaputra is a mix of grayish-white sand mixed with a lot of organic matter. This is very different from most other rivers in Assam which deposit typical coarse brown sand. I have no idea why the colors of should differ so much.


This is the Brahmaputra river delta in Bangladesh: Sundarban. Again notice the extensive braiding of the river channels caused by deposition of sediment before the river runs into the sea to the Bay of Bengal. The Sundarbans are known for extensive magrove forests.



This is Redwood Shores lagoon on San Francisco bay. The brown stream empties into the San Francisco Bay. The unusual color of the water is caused by halophilic (salt-loving) bacteria. The stream presents a hierarchical branching pattern of drainage which is typically seen in much larger scale in large river systems.

The two pictures above are from the Lena river delta. In the top picture, braiding is obvious. In the bottom picture you can see lakes in the delta with frozen boundaries.

The San Francisco bay salt marshes are an endless source of strange colors and forms.

The view from Google Earth: Deserts

I find deserts fascinating.

This is a dry riverbed in Sahara in northern Algeria. Desert streams flow only intermittently when a rare storm hits the desert. Since the desert is bereft of any vegetation, storm water flows downslope violently and can cause deep erosion in a matter of hours. The result is a beautiful fractal-like pattern of drainage. A very similar dendritic pattern can be seen in growing trees or crystals which are formed not by erosion, but by growth.

Although deserts get little rain, erosion and lack of tree cover makes them ideal for observing water based erosion. These two pictures show watercourse patterns in Sahara. The top picture is from Chad in the Tibesti mountains while the bottom one shows a picture from Ahaggar mountains (Algeria).

This is a pair of start shaped dunes in eastern Algeria. Typical dunes are crescent shaped and they form transverse to prevailing winds. If the prevailing winds are multi-directional, then we begin to see star shaped dunes instead.

These are dunes in Rub-al-Khali (The Empty Quarter) in Saudi Arabia. The dunes are formed orthogonal to the prevailing wind directions.

These dunes are near Sossus Vlei in Namib-Naukluft national park in Namibia. The Namib desert is a temperate desert and has some of the tallest and reddest dunes among all deserts. The red coloration comes from oxidized iron compounds. Sossus Vlei is the remnant of a lake which has dried up and left behind a salty flat. Next to Sossus Vlei is Dead Vlei which is a spectacular photography location.

Twisted land forms in southern Algeria. My speculation is that this is an ancient lake bed with a dry salt pan at the center.

The view from Google Earth: The Man-Made Landscape

I have always loved aerial photographs ---this is the way to view the familiar in an unfamiliar way. Google Earth now allows you to become an aerial photographer on the cheap by just downloading a screenshot. Here are some interesting pictures.

Intersection of I-110 and I-105 in Los Angeles. Los Angeles is the city of freeways: many people find highways ugly and unsightly. But I think with flying ramps and elegant curves, freeway intersections can be an intricate work of art. This is a stacked interchange with 5 levels of ramps flying over each other.

The circular spots are crop fields which are irrigated by a pipe that rotates around a central pivot. This is a crop field from Saudi Arabian desert.


A mixture of circular and traditional irrigation can be seen in this picture from Kansas.


Imperial valley is one of the most agriculturally fertile region in California. Much of it is below sea level and is irrigated by a complex system of dams and canals. Overflow of the irrigation system has created the inland lake of Salton Sea.

Salton sea is a saline lake. The red coloration is from halophilic bacteria.

The San Francisco bay has a large number of salt evaporation ponds at its southern end. Halophilic bacteria gives the evaporation ponds their color.


Palm island (Palm Jumeirah) in Dubai.

Climbing at Index (Index Town Wall)

This Sunday (8th July) me and Jared hit the Lower Town Wall in Index for some easy trad climbing. Index is a non-descript "town" one and a quarter hour away from Seattle. Among the Washington climbing regions, Index is well known for high quality steep granite, terrible weather and hard route ratings. The weather this weekend was magnificent: sunny with temperatures in the high 70s. We got out around 7:30 in the morning and was at the base of the Lower Town Wall by 9AM.

We decided to try out the Great Northern Slab (5.6 or 5.7+) depending on the guidebook you believe. GNS has many starts including a 5.6 bushy ramp and a 5th class chimney. There was a party ahead of us who soloed the bushy ramp and all the way to the top of first pitch. To make it a little spicier, I though I'd start out with a 20ft high fist crack on the side rated at 5.8 and thus bypass the ramp. The crack started out innocuous enough, but soon turned to a slippery painful fist crack with no feet. I retreated and let Jared have at it. At the same time another party showed up at the base of GNS. Since we had to hurry up to beat the other party, Jared french freed the fist crack and went all the way to the top of first pitch and belayed at the 1 inch thick railroad bolts. I got the "crux" second pitch. The crux was some awkward moves right above the belay to gain a pair of beautiful finger cracks. The finger cracks were perfect for nuts: I used only nuts and and slings to protect the cracks until I hit the second bolted belay. The team behind us opted to traverse right after the railroad bolts and belayed beneath a 5.6 hand crack which is part of Libra (5.10a or 5.6). Jared made short work of the third pitch which ended at a pair of chains below a slab. The slab was not as well protected as the rest of the route, but it was easy. When we got to the top, the party above us seemed to have disappeared. We didn't think too much about it and rapped down the route while trying to cause least bother to the folks below us.

Next up we decided to try the 5.6 hand crack and to do that we wanted to do a variation on the first pitch of GNS. Just below GNS, there is a 5.10c dihedral about 15 feet high and I thought it might be fun to aid up it and then continue. Dutifully I slotted nuts into the corner, clipped shoulder length slings into them and stood up on the slings. Unfortunately the crack petered out pretty rapidly until only thing I could slot in was my smallest Black Diamond nut. As I fiddled around looking for my next placement, suddenly the small nut popped and shifted below. That was enough aid climbing for me: there was no more place to put pro and the pro I was standing on was slipping! And now the nuts were so tightly lodged into the crack so that we'd have to clean them on rappel. I went back to the bushy ramp, climbed up to the right of GNS and set up a semi hanging belay below the hand crack. Jared led the hand crack and the crack was beautiful. I would have enjoyed it a lot more if my shoes were not pinching my toes. When we got to the end of second pitch for GNS, we rapped back. By then there were a total of four parties on GNS and the raps were getting a bit out of hand with the crowd.

Once we got back on ground, we had lunch and decided to try Robin's Ramp (5.7) on Mid wall. The description of the trail to Mid wall was a bit vague. After a few missteps, we decided to ask the folks at the base of the Lower wall. The Lower wall is very steep ---we walked by City Park (5.13+): it is visible a soaring steep thin crack with a white streak washed around it. Todd Skinner's first free ascent of City Park is an interesting story by itself and you can read about it from Jeff Smoot. After getting directions we started up the trail towards upper wall. The trail was steep and strenuous. On top of that, in the forest the humidity was close to 100% and we were sweating like pigs. Halfway through, we decided to abandon our packs and just go and check out the Mid wall. Jared had to get back home early and we didn't have enough time to climb the route any way. We went quite a bit in, but ultimately lost the trail in a glade full of downed logs and mossy boulders. Obviously people do not use the trail much. We decided to call it a day and hiked back out. When we were close to the parking lot, we met the couple who at the very beginning were ahead of us on GNS. They solved the mystery for us. The used GNS as an approach climb for Winkie Dinkie Wall and Mid Wall is above that. We learnt our lesson: next time we go looking for Mid Wall, we shall just climb GNS and take it from there.

The best of Pakistani ghazals

Today I bought a six volume set of "Best of Pakistani Ghazals" from www.desistore.com. They were cheap ($28+shipping) and quick in shipping: overall a good shopping experience. Especially since I don't buy CDs that often. The CDs themselves have pretty poor production values ---spelling mistakes in the name of the singers, missing information about composers and lyricists and cheesy cover art with smudged printing. The sound quality is not that great either, but that is to be expected since the recordings are pretty old in themselves.

Despite all this, I really like the CD set. I love ghazals, but for some reason Indian singers like Pankaj Udhas and Jagjit Singh leave me a little disappointed. I think they are too modern for my taste ---the Pakistanis like Mehdi Hassan and Ghulam Ali hits the right spot for me. This CD set is a good opportunity to expand my collection of ghazals.

All said and done, I have ambivalent feelings towards ghazals. Ghazals are typically focused on love, especially unsuccessful love. Therefore they lend themselves easily to emotional excess which is not always good for poetry. Although many unsuccessful lovers fancy themselves poets, few of them ever write anything decent. Somebody defined poetry as emotion recalled in tranquility ---the poetry written in the heat of the moment in the grip of emotions typically degenerates to a diatribe or a well of self-pity. The greatest temptation of ghazals as a music form is two fold: good music can turn even the worst doggerel into good poetry. Secondly Urdu is a sublime language which seems to be ideally suited to writing poetry. For example, it is much harder to write technically good poetry in English than in Urdu. But overall, I still
think the ghazal has some wonderful poetry. Just wanted to quote a few verses:

kaisii chalii hai ab ke havaa tere shahar me.n
ba.nde bhii ho gaye hai.n Khudaa tere shahar me.n

kyaa jaane kyaa huaa ke pareshaan ho gaye
ik lahzaa ruk ga_ii thii sabaa tere shahar me.n

kuchh dushmanii kaa Dhab hai.n na ab dostii ke taur
dono.n kaa ek rang huaa tere shahar me.n

shaayad u.nhe.n pataa thaa ke ‘Khatir’ hai ajanabii
logo.n ne us ko luuT liyaa tere shahar me.n

-Khatir Ghaznavi

Incidentally www.urdupoetry.com is a treasure trove for finding ghazals. For the meaning of the words, one can always consult an Urdu-English dictionary.

A first post

Lines from one of my favourite Mehdi Hassan ghazals: they are written by Josh Malihabadi.

ziist hai jab mustaqil aavaaraa gardii hii kaa naam
aql vaalo phir tavaaf-e-kuu-e-jaanaa.N kyo.n na ho?

ziist: existence
mustaqil: relentless
aql: intelligence
tavaaf: to make rounds
kuu: street
jaana: beloved

You can find the complete poem at urdupoetry.com and listen to the ghazal at musicindiaonline.com. The lines are perhaps appropriate for the meandering nature of this blog.