Research Projects

The Himalayan mountain belt, an example of continental-continental collision between the Indian and Eurasian plates is stretching between the Western Himalayan Syntaxis (WHS) in the west and the Eastern Himalayan Syntaxis (EHS) in the east (Gansser, 1964; Valdiya, 1980). The scientific contributions and models proposed for the evolution of the Himalaya has increased our understanding of older orogenic belts. The EHS has attracted the attention of many geologists for its special tectonic position at the end of the mountain belt expressed as a large antiform. It consists of Gangdise, Indus-Tsangpo suture and Himalayan units (Burg et al., 1998). Occurrences of the Himalayan crystallines (HC) all along the Himalaya belt are widely recognized as ductile shear zones (Yin, 2006; Gururajan and Choudhuri, 2003; Bikramaditya and Gururajan, 2011). The HC are distributed along the western and eastern limbs of the EHS in Arunachal Himalaya showing bend at their regional strike from ENE-WSW to NW-SE (Gururajan and Choudhuri, 2003). The study and interpretation of microstructures developed in naturally deformed rocks, plays an important role in unraveling the history and dynamics of tectonic processes recorded in the Earth’s crust (Schmid, 1982). The deformation features recorded in the HC will provide information about the processes and conditions of deformation at different tectonic levels. However, to date, a detailed study on structural analysis of the HC is lacking from the proposed area. Previous works in the proposed study area are mostly dealt with the salient features of geology, tectonostratigraphic setup, petrogenesis and microstructures of Himalayan granitoids (Gururajan and Choudhuri, 2003; Choudhuri et al., 2009; Kumar and Pathak, 2009; Bikramaditya, 2010; Bikramaditya and Gururajan, 2011; Bikramaditya et al., 2020). No detailed information is available on many aspects such as deformation history, microstructures and kinematic analyses of the Himalayan crystallines of the EHS in Arunachal Himalaya and hence the proposed area is chosen for detailed geological investigation on structures. The proposed studies will be carried out along the traverses of the eastern and western limbs of the EHS in Arunachal Himalaya which will enable the future workers in understanding this area in a better way. The mega and microstructural studies of the HC in associate with Anisotropy of magnetic susceptibility (AMS) and Electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) techniques will help in understanding the deformation processes and mechanisms involved during the kinematic evolution of the Himalayan Crystallines. The outcome results will be used to characterize and interpret the growth of the ductile shear zones across the Himalayan belt and the results will also be used to propose a model for the southward ductile extrusion of the Himalayan Crystallines and this will further towards understanding the crustal deformation history and tectonics of the EHS.