 You are clear for launch and with that shut down your visors, O2 on and prepare for ignition to O2. You can copy that and um. Mr. Ruchoff here. All right so what we're going to do today is we're going to start our examination of South Asia by looking at its physical characteristics and here are our objectives we're going to be following. So first let's look at the countries that are in South Asia. First of all there is number one which is Pakistan, there's number two which is India, there is number three which is Nepal, number four is Bhutan, number five is Bangladesh, number six is one we're going to talk about a bit more when we talk about Southeast Asia that's Myanmar and then we have our two island countries. We have number seven which is Archipelago or a group of islands which is the Maldives and number eight is Sri Lankan. If you look at the shape of Sri Lanka you'll understand the reason why it is earned the nickname the Teardrop of India and there are a total of eight different physical features we're going to talk about. There are three mountain ranges, there is one desert and then there are four rivers. So well first of all let's look at those mountains and we would talk about mountains. It is in South Asia we have the largest mountains in the world which are the Himalayas. They also are the youngest mountains in the world. Remember younger mountains actually tend to be taller because they haven't been eroded. Remember the discussion we had about the Appalachians and the Rockies in North America. Now it is in the Himalayas that we have the tallest mountains, the world in fact of the 14 tallest mountains the world 10 of these are found in the Himalayas to include Mount Everest which is the tallest mountain in the world. Now the Himalayas do two very important things. First of all they really impact the the climate of not only the people in South Asia but also East Asia. We'll talk about that when we talk about China next unit and then with also for thousands of years the Himalayas were a barrier between the people in China and the people in India. The Himalayas are a product of cultural folding and this caused between 50 million years ago and even going on today of the Indian subcontinent actually coming and crashing into the Asian continent. In fact this process continues on today as that subcontinent of India continues moving northward and this is the reason why Mount Everest continues to grow an eighth of an inch every year. The second mountain range we're going to talk about is the Hindu Kush. We talked about this during Central Asia. These are the mountains that run from Pakistan down into the central portion of Afghanistan. Now these also are very tall mountains are over 20,000 feet but what are not very tall are our third mountain range which are the Western Ghats. We find our Western Ghats are in the southwestern coast of India and they only are about 8,000 feet but they still have an impact upon the climate because they help locks the moisture from the Indian Ocean going into the interior creating a semi-arid region known as the Deccan Plateau. Now there is another mountain range that we don't have on your map but I'll talk about very quickly which is your Eastern Ghats. The Eastern Ghats also runs along the coastline but along the eastern coastline of India but these only are about 5,000 feet in height. All right so on our map number one we have the Hindu Kush and yeah I skip to you there number two is our Himalayas and number three are our Western Ghats. Now what we're going to do is we're going to talk about the desert and the desert we're talking about is the Thar Desert which is also known as the Great Indian Desert. It is found in the northwest portion of India just as you're getting ready to go into Pakistan. Now there are two different reasons for its creation. First of all there's a rain shuttle effect of the Himalayas and the other mountains that are around here. Also it is due to the fact that it's at 28 degrees latitude and remember when we're talking about the Hadley cells what we know about at about 30 degrees latitude both north and south latitude around the world you have this dry high pressure cells that basically have dry air coming down and pushing moisture away. This is the reason why the largest deserts in the world generally are along 30 degrees and that is the case we see here with the Thar Desert which is number four on your map and then we have some rivers. We have four rivers we're going to talk about. There are the Indus River which is number five that runs through Pakistan. There is number eight which is the Ganges River that runs through the northeast portion of India down through the delta that goes into Bangladesh and then we have the Normana River which is number six which is just to the north of the Deccan Plateau and then we have the Krishna River number seven that goes through the Deccan Plateau. Of these the two most important rivers to know are the Indus River and the Ganges River. The Indus River is important because it is the third of the river civilizations we've talked about this course. Our first two we talked about was the Mesopotamia which is along the Euphrates and the Tigris in the Middle East and then of course there is the Ancient Egypt which has the Nile. It is along the Indus River that the culture of the people in South Asia actually originated. It is the cultural heart of South Asia. The second river is the Ganges River and the reason why the Ganges River is important is because it is considered sacred or holy to Hindus and the reason why it's considered sacred is because it is in the Ganges River that you have the Goddess Ganga and it is said that if you're a Hindu if you go and bathe in the Ganges River the Goddess Ganga will help absolve your sins and have you move one step more towards Moshka which we'll talk about when we talk about Hinduism. Now if this is supposed to wash away your sins the irony is is the Ganges River is the sixth most polluted river in the world. In fact in some of the areas had actually have the highest amount of cancer due to the pollution of the Ganges River. Now these rivers whether it's these two or Osuna Nomada and the Krishna which we talked about before these are important because they provide water to cities and they provide lands for agriculture additionally whenever you have flooding it actually allows for very fertile soils to be deposited knowing as alluvial plains. All right so we talked about those physical features that are important to the settlement of South Asia. Now what we're going to do is we're going to talk about the climate and we're going to talk about the weather and natural disasters of the area and if we were talking about the climate of South Asia the most important thing to understand is monsoons. Now many people will say that a monsoon is a seasonal rains but I want you to think of a monsoon as a seasonal winds because it has to do with how the winds move humidity on and off of the Indian subcontinent. We know that humidity is the amount of water vapor in the air and we know that if there is more humidity there's more chance of rain there is less humidity there's less chance of a rain. And what moves these winds is our friend the intertropical convergent zone. Remember this is this low pressure cell that is usually along the equator however we know that in many different places in the world that the itch the intertropical convergent zone moves north and south based upon these seasons and nowhere has as much migration than in South Asia where the itch will move as much as 40 degrees latitude between summer and winter. Now what this means is is that when you have the itch all the way down to the south you have that dry air of the saddley cells now moving the northern portion of India and what that does is it has this winds are pushing all the humidity off of the continent and therefore it doesn't have very much rain. Now what happens in the summer is the itch moves all the way up to the northern portion of India in which you have a low pressure cell. Now low pressure cell we know brings lots of winds on to the subcontinent bringing lots and lots of rains. Now the impacts of these monsoons are pretty striking when depending upon whether it's summer or it's winter. In summer remember you have that low pressure cell is bringing all the winds and this humidity on this is where India gets 80 percent of its precipitation during the summer monsoons. In the winter monsoons however because you have a high pressure cell that is blowing all this precipitation away now you have less moisture less humidity and less precipitation. In fact drought is a constant problem especially in areas that are part of this monsoon area region such as Bangladesh. Now the effects of the summer monsoon there is a positive which is you have these fertile soils that are deposited these alluvial plains they're during the flooding rivers but during the summer you have also the problems of flooding causing a lot of property damage as well as interfering with transportation. Now if you look at this picture here it's a picture is a one is of the winter and one is of the summer at the same location can you determine which one's at summer and which one's at winter? All right if you said the bottom one is summer you're absolutely right this is the effect that happens between the monsoons. The other thing that monsoons do in addition to climate is how it actually impacted trade. So understanding these monsoon winds sailors have actually timed their journey so that they would be approaching India in the summer when you have the winds at their back pushing you there and then their departure from India in the winter when you had their winds pushing you away. So now we understand the importance of monsoons we can start looking at the actual climates of Southeast Asia and they're depicted in this map. Now there actually is four major climate types which we're going to talk about and we can break those up by region. Now the first climate we have is your tropical wet dry and here we're going to find that type of climate in those areas of South Asia that are more impacted by these monsoons. That would be Central India and Bangladesh. Now as you go up to the northeast portion of India in Nepal and Bhutan you start getting into a humid subtropical climate. This is much like what we find in Florida or even here in Bryan, Texas. And the third climate we have really there's two you have your arid and your semi arid deserts and grasslands. We have in Pakistan and Northwest India you have the thar desert in it and then you also have in Central India you have the Deccan plateau which is a semi arid region. And then if you have the tallest mountains in the world you're going to have your alpine or your highland climates. Here we have those along the Himalayas and the Hindu Kush found in the northern portion of India, Pakistan, Nepal and Bhutan. All right so those are the most important climate types we have in South Asia. Now if we're going to talk about climate one of those conversations that Lofton comes up is that of global warming or climate change and nowhere is probably has a potential of being more impacted than the Maldives. Remember we talked about the Maldives which we went over our countries very quick. This is that group of islands off to the southwest portion of India. It is known as an archipelago. An archipelago is a group of islands and if we talk about a group of islands we know that there's lots of islands. In fact there is over 1196 small islands and they're not very big at all nor are they very tall. The average elevation of the Maldives is just four feet above sea level. In fact the tallest point in the Maldives is just six feet tall. That is just about like here. It's not very tall at all. So the problem with that is that there is lots of scientists who believe that what is happening is because of global warming we have the rise of sea levels. In fact it's been measured that in the last 100 years is actually the seas of rays anywhere between four and eight inches. That doesn't seem like a lot but when your country's average elevation is just four feet tall well this is pretty important. In fact some scientists believe that due to global warming and the rising of the seas the Maldives will be completely covered in the next 100 years and some believe it will actually be uninhabitable within 50 years. Alright so if that's not enough of a natural disaster there are others. So we're going to talk about two. The first are cyclones. Now remember when we talk about hurricanes guess what a cyclone is. A cyclone is a hurricane. It's a tropical storm and we find these largely going into the sea which is known as the sea of Bengal in striking into Bangladesh. But not all of our natural disasters are against the climate. We also have tsunamis. Now tsunamis are very large ocean waves that are caused by tectonic forces either that is a matter of underwater volcanoes or underwater earthquakes such as whenever you have a subduction zone which we find in the ring of what we have is we have one ocean at a plate that is pushed against the other trying to go underneath the other it starts to bend that other plate down. You have so much pressure that what will happen is that one plate will slip and when it slips it'll push all that water up and that water gets to the top it'll basically cause a huge wave that'll go over across the entire ocean. One of the most devastating tsunamis we saw was in 2004 the day after Christmas where you had a nine-point on the Richter scale earthquake in Indonesia. This wave goes crashing across the Indian ocean crashing into the eastern portion of India and even affecting the Horn of Africa. When it was all done it killed over 123,000 people wiping villages off the map. To give you an idea of how powerful this is this is a picture of a beach before the tsunami and a picture after. So what we've done is very quickly as we talked about the physical features that impact the settlement in South Asia we talked about the climate in South Asia and we talked about how weather and natural disasters have impacted the people of South Asia. Okay we'll see you back in the classroom.