Many of the world's languages face serious risk of extinction. Efforts to prevent this cultural loss are severely constrained by a poor understanding of the geographical patterns and drivers of extinction risk. We quantify the global distribution of language extinction risk-represented by small range and speaker population sizes and rapid declines in the number of speakers-and identify the unde...

A high-resolution (40 km horizontal) global model is used to examine controls on the South Asian summer monsoon by orography and surface heat fluxes. In a series of integrations with altered topography and reduced surface heat fluxes, monsoon strength, as indicated by a vertical wind shear index, is highly correlated with the amplitude of the maximum boundary layer equivalent potential temperat...

The change in oxygen isotopic composition of precipitation is modeled using equilibrium fractionation during Rayleigh distillation linked to the thermodynamics of atmospheric ascent and water vapor condensation. The primary controllers of the vertical variation in isotopic composition with elevation are the low elevation temperature and relative humidity as these control the vertical distributi...

Embelia ribes Burm F. is large scandent shrub, disturbed throughout India and belongs to the family Myrsinacae. It is commonly known as false black pepper or Vidanga. E. ribes grows in semievergreen and deciduous forests at an altitude of 1,500m found in central and lower Himalayas, Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Bengal, Orissa, Andhra Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh throughout India. Embelia ribes has b...

The Permian-Triassic boundary in the Himalayas is reviewed and discussed in the light of palaeontologic and stratigraphic data collected during the past two and a half decades from Kashmir, Spiti and Nepal. The deposition of the Kuling Shales and their equivalents in different parts of the Himalayas was followed by shallowing and regression of the sea. Sedimentation was interrupted at the t...

The Himalayan belt is known for seismic activities; however, activities across this are not uniform due to various factors, including stress regime, heterogeneity of subsurface material, and the manner by which major tectonic Indian plate colliding with Eurasian plate. In study, three sample regions spanning northwest northeast Himalayas (Kashmir, Nepal, regions) were selected, their b-values f...