[Mission 2023] STATIC QUIZ, 6 December 2022 – Geography

Solution: b)

Rising sea levels, heatwaves, melting glaciers and storms are some of the well-known consequences of climate change. New research has added yet another impact to this list – marked shifts in the axis along which the Earth rotates.

The Earth’s axis of rotation is the line along which it spins around itself as it revolves around the Sun. The points on which the axis intersects the planet’s surface are the geographical north and south poles.

The location of the poles is not fixed, however, as the axis moves due to changes in how the Earth’s mass is distributed around the planet. Thus, the poles move when the axis moves, and the movement is called “polar motion”.

Solution: d)

Himalayan Frontal Thrust (HFT) also known as the Main Frontal Thrust (MFT), is a geological fault along the boundary of the Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates. The Kopili Fault is a 300-km northwest-southeast trending fault from the Bhutan Himalaya to the Burmese arc.

A fault is “a fracture along which the blocks of crust on either side have moved relative to one another parallel to the fracture”. When an earthquake occurs on one of these faults, the rock on one side of the fault slips with respect to the other. The fault surface can be vertical, horizontal, or at some angle to the surface of the earth.

The Northeast is located in the highest seismological zone.

The collision zone between India and Eurasia along the tremendous Himalayan mountain range has one of the highest seismic hazards in the world.

Solution: a)

While El Niño (Spanish for ‘little boy’), the expression heard more commonly in India, is the abnormal surface warming observed along the eastern and central regions of the Pacific Ocean (region between Peru and Papua New Guinea), La Niña (Spanish for ‘little girl’) is an abnormal cooling of these surface waters.

Together, the El Niño and La Niña phenomena are termed as El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO). These are large-scale ocean phenomena which inflence the global weather — winds, temperature and rainfall. They have the ability to trigger extreme weather events like droughts, floods, hot and cold conditions, globally.

While La Niña conditions enhance the rainfall associated with the Southwest monsoon, it has a negative impact on rainfall associated with the Northeast monsoon.

Solution: c)

Hail is produced by cumulonimbus clouds, which are generally large and dark and may cause thunder and lightning. In such clouds, winds can blow up the water droplets to heights where they freeze into ice. The frozen droplets begin to fall but are soon pushed back up by the winds and more droplets freeze onto them, resulting in multiple layers of ice on the hailstones. This fall and rise is repeated several times, till the hailstones become too heavy and fall down.

Solution: b)

Iron ore occurs most abundantly in the form of oxides. Other forms are carbonates, hydroxides, sulphides and silicates. It is also found in association with titanium dioxide.

Hematite is the most abundant iron ore mineral and is the main constituent of the iron ore industry in India.

The major Hematite type iron deposits are located in well-defined belts in the States of Odisha, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, Goa and Karnataka.