💥Join UPSC 2027,2028 Mentorship (August Batch) + XFactor Notes & Microthemes PDF
Talk to Mentor

Civilsdaily

Login

GS Paper: GS1

  • Meru Jatra Festival

    Odisha’s Ganjam district administration has banned the Meru Jatra festival and congregations related to it at temples on the occasion of Mahavishub Sankranti.

    Festive fairs in India are known for their age-old traditions and some historic background.  Meru Jatra is one of such fairs. We can expect a match the pairs question on such fairs.

    Meru Jatra

    • In Southern Odisha, the Meru Yatra festival is celebrated as the end of the month-long Danda nata dance festival.
    • Thousands of devotees gather at the Shakti Pitha shrine in the Taratarini Temple because it is one of the auspicious days during the Chaitra Yatra.
    • People from all over the state eat festive chhatua and drink Bel Pana to mark the occasion.

    What is Danda nata?

    • Danda as the name implies, is self-inflicted pain, which the danduas (people who participate in the festival) undergo to pay their obeisance to the lord Kali.
    • It is also a form of worshipping the lord Shiva and his consort Parvati.
    • The origin of the festival is generally traced to 8th and 9th AD after the decadence of Buddhism in Orissa.

  • Earth’s seismic noise levels

    Scientists at the British Geological Survey (BGS) reported a change in the Earth’s seismic noise and vibrations amid the coronavirus lockdown. This change has been monitored through a space-based seismograph.

    Ever heard of space-based monitoring of seismic activities?  This topic creates a scope for potential prelims question…

    What is seismic noise?

    • In geology, seismic noise refers to the relatively persistent vibration of the ground due to a multitude of causes.
    • It is the unwanted component of signals recorded by a seismometer– the scientific instrument that records ground motions, such as those caused by earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and explosions.
    • This noise includes vibrations caused due to human activity, such as transport and manufacturing, and makes it difficult for scientists to study seismic data that is more valuable.
    • Apart from geology, seismic noise is also studied in other fields such as oil exploration, hydrology, and earthquake engineering.

    How are vibrations generated?

    • We measure ground vibrations from earthquakes using seismometers.
    • These are incredibly sensitive so they also pick up other sources of vibration too, including human activity, such as road traffic, machinery and even people walking past.
    • All these things generate vibrations that propagate as seismic waves through the Earth.

    Reasons for the decline

    • Due to the enforcement of lockdown measures around the world to tackle the novel coronavirus pandemic, the Earth’s crust has shown reduced levels of vibration.

    How do the reduced noise levels help scientists?

    • The seismic noise vibrations caused by human activity are of high frequency (between 1-100 Hz), and travel through the Earth’s surface layers.
    • Usually, to measure seismic activity accurately and reduce the effect of seismic noise, geologists place their detectors 100 metres below the Earth’s surface.
    • However, since the lockdown, researchers were able to study natural vibrations even from surface readings, owing to lesser seismic noise.
    • Due to lower noise levels, scientists are now hoping that they would be able to detect smaller earthquakes and tremors that had slipped past their instruments so far.

     

  • [pib] Diverse names of harvesting festival

    The nation today celebrates the festival of harvest, Vaishakhi under diverse names. Vaisakhi celebrates the solar new year, based on the Hindu Vikram Samvat calendar.

    Vaishakhi

    • Vaisakhi also known as Baisakhi is a historical and religious festival in Sikhism.
    • It is usually celebrated on 13 or 14 April every year which commemorates the formation of Khalsa panth of warriors under Guru Gobind Singh in 1699.
    • In Sikhism, Vaisakhi marks the start of the Khalsa in 1699 by Guru Gobind Singh.

    Other names

    • Maha Bishuba Pana Sankranti (Odisha)
    • Bikhu or Bikhauti (Kumaon region of Uttarakhand)
    • Bisu (Tulu region of Karnataka)
    • Bohag Bihu (Assam)
    • Puthandu (Tamil Nadu)
    • Vishu (Kerala)

    Note: Harvest festivals are significant events. Do try to remember their names as one can expect a match the pair question.

  • Assamese Gamosa 

    The COVID-19 pandemic has made the Assamese gamosa, a decorative cotton towel, evolve from memento to mask.

    Gamosa

    • The Gamosa is an article of significance for the people of Assam.
    • It is generally a white rectangular piece of cloth with primarily a red border on three sides and red woven motifs on the fourth (in addition to red, other colors are also used).
    • Although cotton yarn is the most common material for making/weaving gamosas, there are special occasion ones made from Pat silk.

    Types

    • Assam has traditionally had two types of gamosas the uka and the phulam.
    • The uka or plain kind is used to wipe sweat or dry the body after a bath.
    • The phulam is decorated with floral motifs to be gifted as a memento or during festivals such as Bihu.

    Significance

    • Cultural historians say the gamosa came to symbolise Assamese nationalism in 1916 when the Asom Chatra Sanmilan, a students’ organisation was formed, followed by the Assam Sahitya Sabha, a literary body.
    • Wearing the phulam gamosa around the neck became a standard for cultural identity.
    • Thegamosa’s graph as a symbol of protest rose during the anti-foreigners Assam Agitation from 1979 to 1985.
    • The gamosa staged a comeback as a political statement with the protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act from mid-December 2019.

  • Third mass bleaching of Great Barrier Reef

    A survey has found record sea temperatures had caused the third mass bleaching of the 2,300-kilometre Great Barrier Reef system in just five years.

    What is Coral Bleaching?

    • When corals face stress by changes in conditions such as temperature, light, or nutrients, they expel the symbiotic algae zooxanthellae living in their tissues, causing them to turn completely white.
    • This phenomenon is called coral bleaching.
    • The pale white colour is of the translucent tissues of calcium carbonate which are visible due to the loss of pigment-producing zooxanthellae.

    About Great Barrier Reef

    • The Great Barrier Reef is the world’s largest coral reef system composed of over 2,900 individual reefs and 900 islands.
    • It is stretched for over 2,300 kilometres over an area of approximately 344,400 square kilometres.
    • The reef is located in the Coral Sea, off the coast of Queensland, Australia.

    Importance of Corals

    Coral reefs are some of the most diverse and valuable ecosystems on Earth.

    • They support more species per unit area than any other marine environment, including about 4,000 species of fish, 800 species of hard corals and hundreds of other species.
    • This biodiversity is considered key to finding new medicines for the 21st century. Many drugs are now being developed from coral reef animals and plants as possible cures for cancer, arthritis, human bacterial infections, viruses, and other diseases.
    • Healthy coral reefs support commercial and subsistence fisheries as well as jobs and businesses through tourism and recreation.
    • Local economies receive billions of dollars from visitors to reefs through diving tours, recreational fishing trips, hotels, restaurants, and other businesses based near reef ecosystems.
    • Coral reef structures also buffer shorelines against 97 percent of the energy from waves, storms, and floods, helping to prevent loss of life, property damage, and erosion.
    • When reefs are damaged or destroyed, the absence of this natural barrier can increase the damage to coastal communities from normal wave action and violent storms.

    Back2Basics

    Coral Reefs

    • Coral reefs are built by and made up of thousands of tiny animals—coral “polyps”—that are related to anemones and jellyfish.
    • Polyps are shallow water organisms which have a soft body covered by a calcareous skeleton. The polyps extract calcium salts from sea water to form these hard skeletons.
    • The polyps live in colonies fastened to the rocky sea floor.
    • The tubular skeletons grow upwards and outwards as a cemented calcareous rocky mass, collectively called corals.
    • When the coral polyps die, they shed their skeleton on which new polyps grow.
    • The cycle is repeated for over millions of years leading to accumulation of layers of corals shallow rock created by these depositions is called reef.

  • [pib] Ionospheric based monitoring of large earthquakes

    Scientists of Indian Institute of Geomagnetism (IIG) an autonomous institution of the DST have extensively studied the signatures of recent large earthquakes into the ionosphere with an ambitious aim to derive the seismic source characteristics from the ionosphere.

    CLAIMS

    • The research is a part of the interdisciplinary program ‘Coupled Lithosphere-Atmosphere- Ionosphere-Magnetosphere System (CLAIMS)’ of IIG.
    • CLAIMS focuses on energy transfer to the atmosphere during solid Earth processes such as earthquakes as well as tsunamis.

    Key terms: Co-seismic Ionospheric Perturbations (CIP)

    • In general, the Earth crust uplift during an earthquake produces compressional (i.e. pressure) waves in the overlying atmosphere.
    • These waves propagate upward in the region of exponentially decreasing atmospheric neutral density, and thus, wave amplitude increase with atmospheric heights.
    • On arrival at ionospheric heights, the waves redistribute ionospheric electron density and produce electron density perturbations (disruption) known as CIP.

    Objective of CLAIMS

    • The spatial distribution of near field co-seismic Ionospheric perturbations (CIP) associated with this event could reflect well the ground deformation pattern evolved around the epicentre.
    • These CIPs were derived using the Global Positioning System (GPS) measured Total Electron Content (TEC).
    • The CIP distribution was estimated at Ionospheric piercing point (IPP) altitude.

    Other factors affecting CIP

    The major effective non-tectonic forcing mechanisms at ionospheric altitudes are the-

    1. orientation between the ambient geomagnetic field and seismic induced neutral wave perturbations.
    2. orientation between the moving satellite line of sights and the wave perturbations.
    3. ambient ionospheric electron density gradient.

    Back2Basics

    Ionosphere

    • The ionosphere is the ionized part of Earth’s upper atmosphere, from about 60 km to 1,000 km altitude.
    • It is a region that includes the thermosphere and parts of the mesosphere and exosphere.
    • It is ionized by solar radiation.

  • COVID-19 and its impact on climate talks

    Context

    • Amidst the pandemic, people are breathing cleaner air and are witness to clearer, bluer skies as the human movement has been restricted due to lockdowns imposed by various countries.
    • But while the air may be getting cleaner, the lockdowns are not exactly good news for climate change research.
    • Climate talks are witnessing setbacks in the form of funding cuts, cancelled climate conferences and reduced political will to tackle climate change.

    COVID-19 impacting climate change research

    • The hard paced climate change research has been halted and it might become difficult to restart the conversation around it, even after the pandemic is brought under control.
    • The major projects that were scheduled to gather environmental data have all been cancelled or postponed and the crisis has also cast a shadow on routine monitoring of weather and climate change.
    • Further, because commercial flights are running at a lesser frequency, it has also become difficult to collect ambient temperatures and the wind speed, which is taken by in-flight sensors.
    • The other reason that other research has more or less been halted is because of restrictions including lockdowns, insistence on working from home and other social distancing requirements.

    Scope for a back seat

    • Due to the looming health crisis, human kind’s immediate survival is the biggest concern at the moment.
    • However, completely ignoring environmental policy may not be in humanity’s best interest.
    • Largely we still view the environment, and life on earth, as separate. This separation is a dangerous delusion.
    • We can and must do better if we want to prevent the next infectious pandemic.

    Climate change and infectious diseases are not separate

    • The two are not directly related, which is to say that climate change did not lead to the spread of the coronavirus.
    • However, there is a possibility that climate change could have exacerbated the impact of COVID-19 by making the consequences worse for some humans.
    • For instance, air pollution’s impact on human health could make some consequences of the disease more severe for a few humans.
    • A 2003 study on air pollution and the case fatality rate for SARS showed that people exposed to air pollution were more likely to suffer severe consequences from the disease.

  • Pink Supermoon/ Paschal Moon

    A supermoon is all scheduled to show up in the sky on April 7. It would be the biggest and brightest full moon of 2020.

    Pink Supermoon

    • According to NASA, a supermoon takes place when a full moon is at its closest to the Earth.
    • When the full moon appears at perigee (closest point from the earth) it is slightly brighter and larger than a regular full moon — and that is what we call a “supermoon.”
    • They are called Supermoons because they are 7 per cent bigger and 15 per cent brighter, compared to an average full Moon.
    • The moon will not be originally pink in colour. It got its name from the pink wildflowers – Wild Ground Phlox – that bloom in the spring and are native to North America.
    • It is also called Paschal moon because, in the Christian calendar, this is used to calculate the date for Easter – the first Sunday after the Paschal Moon is Easter Sunday.

  • Earth Hour

    The Earth Hour, observed annually on the last Saturday of March, was recently celebrated.

    Earth Hour

    • Earth Hour is a worldwide movement organized by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF).
    • It is held annually encouraging individuals, communities, and businesses to turn off non-essential electric lights, for one hour, from 8:30 to 9:30 p.m. on a specific day towards the end of March as a symbol of commitment to the planet.
    • It was started as a lights-off event in Sydney, Australia, in 2007.

  • World Happiness Report, 2020

     

    The World Happiness Report for 2020 has been recently released.

    The World Happiness Report

    • The WHR is an annual publication of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network.
    • It contains articles and rankings of national happiness based on respondent ratings of their own lives which the report also correlates with various life factors.
    • The 2020 report for the first time ranks cities around the world by their subjective well-being and digs more deeply into how the social, urban and natural environments combine to affect our happiness.

    Highlights of the 2020 report

    • Finland has been declared the world’s happiest nation for the third year running.
    • As in each of the previous seven reports, Nordic states dominated the top ten, along with countries such as Switzerland, New Zealand and Austria. Luxembourg also edged into the tenth spot for the first time this year.

    Why Finland?

    • People in Finland are said to be shy, away from spontaneous demonstrations of joy, valuing instead the quiet and solitude of the country’s vast forests and thousands of lakes.
    • The northern country’s long dark winters were reputed to be behind high levels of alcoholism and suicide, but a decade-long public health drive has helped cut rates by more than half.
    • Finland’s residents enjoy a high quality of life, security and public services, with rates of inequality and poverty among the lowest of all OECD countries.

    India’s dismal performance

    • India was at a 144 rank nestled between Lesotho and Malawi nations.
    • Pakistan, on the other hand, has been ranked 66.