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Grain Sorting on a Coastal dune of Orissa, Bay of Bengal and a comparison with the Desert Dune of Rajasthan, India

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Author Affiliations

  • 1Department of Geology, University of Calcutta, 35 B. C. Road, Kolkata- 700 019 INDIA
  • 2 Department of Remote Sensing and GIS, Vidyasagar University, Midnapore, West-Bengal – 721102, INDIA
  • 3 Department of Geography and Environment Management, Vidyasagar University, Midnapore, West-Bengal – 721102, INDIA

Int. Res. J. Earth Sci., Volume 3, Issue (8), Pages 14-31, August,25 (2015)

Abstract

Grain sorting patterns and textural parameters of a coastal dune of Konark, Orissa has been compared with the desert dune of Thar, Rajasthan, India. Sand samples were collected from the stoss, crest and the lee sides of the dunes. Grain-size distribution patterns were critically studied and compared with three hypothesized model distributions: log-normal, log-hyperbolic and the log-skew-Laplace to discriminate the coastal sands from the desert sands. In general, it is observed that the coastal dune sands are coarser and poorly sorted than the desert dune sands. Almost all the coastal and the desert dune sands, are positively skewed. Coastal dune sands are platy to leptokurtic distributed and desert sands are leptokurtic distributed. In terms of symmetry index, coastal dune sands exhibit a narrow range of symmetry index as compared to the desert dune sands. The log-skew-Laplace is the best-fit grain-size distribution model for coastal dune sands for stoss and crest samples whereas log-hyperbolic is the best-fit statistical model for lee samples; for desert sands, log-hyperbolic is the best-fit grain-size distribution model of the stoss and crest sands whereas log-normal is the best-fit statistical model for lee sands. The results of ANOVA and Tukey test signify the variance between coastal and desert dune sands. Finally, the canonical discriminant function yielded two distinctly separate spaces for coastal and desert dunes.

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