By Jaideep Sarin
Chandigarh, Feb 2 (IANS) He has drilled the highest tubewell in the world and holds a Guinness record for the feat. He spends most of his time looking for precious water resources in the high Himalayas. And now geologist-entrepreneur Ritesh Arya wants to demolish the "myth" that global warming is a consequence of human activities and says its a "100 percent natural cyclic process".
"Global warming is a natural process and man and his activities have no role in enhancing or reducing the cyclic process," Arya says.
He terms the views propounded by the Nobel prize-winning Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as the "unnecessary myths about global warming".
Arya is now preparing to share his findings on global warming as a research paper for presentation at the 'Global Conference on Global Warming 2011' at Lisbon, Portugal, in July this year.
"I will be using actual field geological evidence collected in the cold desert of the Ladakh region to show global warming is a 100 percent natural cyclic process. It is evident that we are in a global warming era and the process of warming has been continuing since the last Ice-age, believed to have ended around 10,000 years ago," Arya told IANS here.
Arya, who studied at Panjab University's Department of Geology (1993) and later worked as a hydro-geologist on daily wages with the Himachal Pradesh government at a royal salary of Rs.82 (USD 1.8) per day, now heads a company called Arya Drillers and Geo-Energy.
He was declared a Guinness world record holder in 2001 for drilling the highest tubewell at over 11,000 feet for the army near Leh. He has drilled tubewells at the world's highest battlefield, the Siachen glacier, at heights of 13,000 feet and above in permanently snow-capped areas.
His feats include drilling a tube-well at 14,260 feet at Chishul (Ladakh), the area of a fierce battle in the 1962 India-China war, in 2006. This is listed in the Limca Book of Records.
"We have been able to practically dispel the earlier belief that there is no groundwater in the Himalayas. My belief is that groundwater can be found at any place below the height of 8,848 metres (the height of Mount Everest)," Arya stated.
He was listed among the top 10 small-scale renewable energy innovators at the World Future Energy Summit at Abu Dhabi in January this year for his work on geo-thermal energy in the Himalayas.
He will be employing qualitative and quantitative distinctions in the deposition of sediments (now solidified as rock) to demonstrate the cyclical warming and cooling phases that the earth seems to have undergone over time.
"We have found evidences of the Indus glacier for the first time. The Indus Valley civilisation was destroyed nearly 5,000 years ago due to the melting of this glacier. There was no pollution or vehicles at that time.
"The IPCC says that global warming is manmade and especially from uncontrolled carbon dioxide emissions. We will provide geological evidences to prove that it is actually a natural process," Arya asserted.
"The centre of C-alphabet represents a global warming maxima and it is at this time where maximum mountain flash flooding leading to maximum destruction and erosion along glacio-fluvial basin takes place, ultimately leading to a sea level rise and land submergence in coasts. This is the cause of maximum destruction."
"By knowing which part of the C-curve paleo signature we are in, we can actually predict if we are entering the global warming or cooling phase and when the next global warming maxima is going to be. But a lot depends on the accuracy of exact age of the last Ice-age.
"Presently, we are in the half-cycle and it seems that we have entered into a warming phenomenon. The flash-flood and mud-slide in Leh and other parts of the world last year are indicators that we are either at the maxima of global warming or near it," Arya said.
The Guardian's environment editor John Vidal has said: "Ritesh Arya is an Indian hydro-geologist who in 2001 found groundwater at over 11,000 ft in the Himalayas, the highest that it has ever been discovered.
"He is backed by three Nordic research groups as well as giant Norwegian oil company Statoil, and is finding geothermal resources in places where no one thought it could be. Thousands of Himalayan communities could benefit from the source of renewable energy."
Arya was in November last year appointed Indian coordinator to head INDNOR, a multi-million dollar joint-scientific project of Norway, Iceland and India, an initiative aimed at evolving new green technologies based on geothermal energy resources in the Himalayas.