Abstract
The Subansiri, a major tributary of the Brahmaputra with its catchment area (35763 km2) spreading almost entirely in the Eastern Himalayas across almost all the major and local tectonic features in the area witnesses large numbers of seismic events. Active tectonic indices like relief and slope, drainage pattern, longitudinal profile, valley profile, hypsometry, valley asymmetry factors and transverse topographic symmetry index, stream length gradient, valley floor-height ratio extracted from SRTM 3 arc-second data prove that the evolving basin morphology has substantial contribution from the Himalayan tectonics. Seismic data are incorporated in the study to establish the potentially active tectonic elements in the catchment area. The study shows that the western part of the Subansiri River Basin is profoundly tilted towards north in the upper catchment and towards east in the lower and middle part of the catchment. The predominant tectonic movements in the western part of the basin caused the tilting of the basin towards north in the upstream and towards east in the middle and lower parts.
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Acknowledgements
The authors are thankful to the Department of Geological Sciences, Gauhati University, Assam, India for providing the necessary laboratory supports to carry out the study. We offer our gratitude to DST, Govt. of India for the FIST (2016–2021) project funding to the Department of Geological Sciences to develop the laboratories. We acknowledge the services provided by the USGS website for source of the SRTM DEM data and the earthquake catalogue. We are also thankful to the ISC portal and NEIST, Jorhat, Assam, India for providing earthquake catalogue. The authors are very much thankful to the anonymous reviewers for their suggestions to improve the research article.
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Kumar, D., Duarah, B.P. Geomorphic signatures of active tectonics in Subansiri River Basin, eastern Himalayas. J. Mt. Sci. 17, 1523–1540 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11629-019-5492-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11629-019-5492-x