The Himalayas in Nepal!

Hi everyone!

I finally made it here!! Luckily my flight was called earlier than expected, so I got here only an hour later than I originally planned. I'm staying with a very nice family in their house in a little village called Gharmi. It's about a 1/2 and hour steep hike up from the nearest road, but its so worth it! Everyone is making me feel very welcome, and the kids even greeted me with flowers! So sweet! Tomorrow I will take a long hike, which will be amazing!

A picture of the rice fields:

http://travisreed.blogspot.com/2011/01/village-gharmi.html

So as you probably know, the Himalayas are a giant mountain range spreading across Nepal, which is where I'm staying. This is a very good example of continental collision, which is type of convergent boundary. This collision is between the Indo-Australian Plate, and the Eurasian plate. When the two plates hit each other, they sort of "crumple". This creates the mountain range.

http://www.earthscrust.org/science/transects/img/ural/fig1.png

These shifts do create earthquakes from time to time. Just a couple days ago, Western Nepal was hit by a 5.7 earthquake. No one was killed, and luckily the casualties were very minor. I just hope they don't get hit by a really bad one!!!

I'll blog again soon!


Grace