The Geological Survey of India (GSI), here on Monday,launched 22 permanent global positioning system (GPS) stations across India toidentify seismically hazardous zones and encourage mapping activities.
“The GSI has taken a stride to establish and maintain anetwork of continuously operating 35 permanent GPS stations in a phased manner.So far, 22 GPS permanent stations have been set up and another 13 will beoperational by March 2020,” Director General Dinesh Gupta said on GSI’s169th Foundation Day.
The 22 GPS-Geodetic (pertaining to Geodesy, the science ofearth measurement) observatories are located in Kolkata, Thiruvananthapuram,Jaipur, Pune, Dehradun, Chennai, Jabalpur, Bhubaneswar, Patna, Raipur, Bhopal,Chandigarh, Gandhinagar Vishakhapatnam, Agartala, Itanagar, Mangan, Jammu,Lucknow, Nagpur, Shillong and Little Andaman.
The new 13 stations will be located in Aizawl, Faridabad,Uttarkashi, Pithoragarh, Cooch Behar, Zawar, North Andaman, Middle Andaman,South Andaman, Ranchi, Mangalore, Imphal and Chitradurga.
“These stations are meant to delineate high strainzones for earthquake probability, determine a seismic motion on faults that maylead to a rupture and produce thematic maps with high positionalaccuracy,” said Gupta.
The GSI is also keen on getting youngsters interested ingeology and has taken several initiatives for this, the first beingintroduction of geology at the school level.
“We have prepared the syllabus and requested the HRDMinistry to introduce the subject in secondary and higher secondary schooleducation boards,” said Gupta.
The organisation has launched a platform called”Bhuvisamvad” under the Ministry of Mines to facilitate interactionbetween geo-scientists and university and college students.
The GSI has also signed a memorandum of understanding withIIT-Hyderabad, and ISM-Dhanbad that envisages capacity building andcollaborative research leading to awarding of PhD degrees.