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The Himalaya is one of the hardest places on Earth to do geology: steep, remote and folded into knots. D. N. Wadia began working there as a college teacher using his holidays, and ended as one of the country's foremost Himalayan geologists. This post covers how he started, the textbook he wrote, what he found, and what students can take from his habits.
Who was D. N. Wadia?
The Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology records that he was born on 23 October 1883 in Surat. He graduated from Baroda College in 1905 with natural science, zoology and botany, and took geology largely through self-study, since the college had few facilities for it.
In 1906 he became a lecturer at the Prince of Wales College, Jammu, and was asked to organise the geology department from scratch. The institute says he spent much of his holidays from 1907 to 1920 on field work, collecting the evidence for new ideas about the Himalaya. In 1921, at 38, he joined the Geological Survey of India as an assistant superintendent.
Why did he write Geology of India?
The 1919 first edition, Geology of India for Students, opens with his reason. "As a lecturer in Geology to students preparing for the Punjab University Examinations I have constantly experienced great difficulty in the teaching of the Geology of India, because of the absence of any adequate modern book on the subject."
He explains that the only existing work was the Geological Survey's own manual of 1887, revised in 1893, which was out of date and out of print. Students had to search for information "piecemeal" in the Survey's many records, so that much of it "remained locked up in the shelves of a few Libraries in the country". His book was meant to gather that material into one textbook a student could use.
What is the Nanga Parbat syntaxis?
Mountain belts are not straight. Their rock layers, folds and faults run in a general direction called the trend, and in some places that trend swings round sharply. Geologists call such a sharp bend a syntaxis.
The institute's biography says his paper on the syntaxis of the north-western Himalaya, describing "the acute arcuate knee bend of the entire Himalayan belt around a pivotal point of Nanga Parbat", brought him national and international fame. In 1937 he contributed a paper on the tectonic relations of the Himalaya with the north Indian foreland to the International Geological Congress in Moscow.
His Royal Society biographical memoir puts the work in context. In the 1920s and 1930s the Geological Survey of India was mapping the structure of the Himalaya, and "Wadia's interpretation of the detailed stratigraphy and geological structure of the western part of that formidable mountain range was of outstanding value."
How do geologists see a bend that big?
Nobody can see a syntaxis from one hillside. It appears when many small observations are put on one map:
At each outcrop, the geologist measures the direction in which a rock layer runs across the land, called its strike.
Each measurement is drawn on a map as a short line.
Over hundreds of points, the lines show a pattern. Where they run parallel, the belt is straight. Where they swing round a point, the belt bends.
Stratigraphy, the order of the layers, then shows which rocks are older and how they were folded. This is why his holiday field work in Jammu and Kashmir mattered: each trip added points to the map. Our post on Charles Lyell and geology explains why reading layers works.
What did he do after the Survey?
The memoir lists his later roles: Government Mineralogist of Ceylon, Mineral Adviser to the Government of India, Director of the Indian Bureau of Mines and, from 1949 until his death on 15 June 1969, Geological Adviser to the Atomic Energy Commission. He was the first geologist made a National Professor by the Government of India.
The institute's page lists the Back Award of the Royal Geographical Society in 1934, the Lyell Medal of the Geological Society of London in 1943 and his election as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1957. He presided over the International Geological Congress in New Delhi in December 1964 and received the Padma Bhushan. The institute's history records that it began in June 1968 in the geology department of Delhi University, moved to Dehradun in 1976, and was renamed after him.
What can a student take from how he worked?
Use small blocks of time. Years of holiday field work added up to new ideas about a mountain range.
Collect, then connect. Single strike readings mean little; hundreds on one map reveal a bend in a continent.
Teach to learn. He organised a department and wrote a textbook before he was a famous researcher.
If plate tectonics and fold mountains feel abstract, the Fermi Concept Library has every concept in physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics and computing, each with its own lesson. For the wider story of moving continents, see our post on Alfred Wegener and continental drift.
This week, take one chapter and write a one-page summary from three different sources, the way Wadia gathered scattered records into one book.
