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South Asia – Editorial Introduction

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Mountains produced by Alpine earth movements extend eastward, then northward in Pakistan, and eastward as the Himalayas before turning southward to Burma. The Indian subcontinent juts southward from this mountainous zone, between the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal. The coastline from Pakistan to Burma is subject to swell from the Indian Ocean and the waves generated by monsoon winds, southerly and south-westerly in June to September and north-easterly in October and November.

The Pakistan coast has sandy beaches bordering a narrow coastal plain backed and interrupted by marine terraces on Tertiary sandstones and limestones, which form cliffed headlands where they reach the coast. The Makran, Las Bela and Karachi coastal regions are neotectonic, subject to recurrent earthquakes. To the east is the large Indus delta, with tidal estuaries between beaches, spits and barrier islands, extensive mudflats and some mangroves (Nayak 2005).

East of the Indus delta the Rann of Kutch is a saline...

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Reference

  • Nayak GN (2005) Indian Ocean coasts, coastal geomorphology. In: Schwartz ML (ed) Encyclopedia of Coastal Science. Springer, Dordrecht, pp 554–557

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© 2010 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.

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(2010). South Asia – Editorial Introduction. In: Bird, E.C.F. (eds) Encyclopedia of the World's Coastal Landforms. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-8639-7_197

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