Advances in Remote Sensing Technology and the Three Poles

21 Landscapes and Paleoclimate of the Ladakh Himalaya

Anil Kumar^1,*, Rahul Devrani^1,2 and Pradeep Srivastava^1,3

¹ Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology, Dehradun 248001² Delhi School of Climate Change & Sustainability,Institution of Eminence, University of Delhi, Delhi 1100073 Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee 247667* Corresponding author

21.1 Introduction

The arid-glaciated mountainous landscape of the Ladakh Himalaya belongs to the western part of the Himalayan mountain range. In the exceptionally varied geomorphic landscapes of the Indian subcontinent, the Ladakh Himalaya exhibits a perfect assemblage of glaciated, fluvial, and lacustrine landforms and its exclusive human civilization history (Chadda et al., 2021). The well-defined first-order structures and topography of the Ladakh Himalaya can be traced to pre- to post-Himalayan orogeny processes. Since its upliftment in the Eocene, due to the collision of the Indian and the Eurasian plates, the Ladakh Himalaya has been interacting with tectonic, glacial, fluvial, and hillslope processes (Owen et al., 2006; Dortch et al., 2013; Sinclair et al., 2016; Kumar and Srivastava, 2017; Kumar et al., 2020b; Pundir et al., 2020; Nag et al., 2021). Such variety in the landforms in the Ladakh Himalaya is an added result of diverse structural and climatic characteristics and geomorphological processes working at different temporal and spatial scales.

In the Quaternary period, there was no persistency in the climatic conditions, ...