page_title: Vinod Kumar Gaur
section_title: Legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Vinod Kumar Gaur / Legacy
caption_attribution_description: Hanle Observatory in Ladakh, India. This is world's highest observatory for optical and infra-red astronomy
context_page_description: Vinod Kumar Gaur is an Indian seismologist, a former director of the National Geophysical Research Institute and an honorary emeritus scientist at CSIR Fourth Paradigm Institute, known for his prediction of the April 2015 Nepal earthquake. He is reported to have conducted extensive studies on the tectonics of the Himalayas and is an elected fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, India, The World Academy of Sciences, Indian Academy of Sciences and the Indian National Science Academy. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, one of the highest Indian science awards for his contributions to Earth, Atmosphere, Ocean and Planetary Sciences in 1979.
context_section_description: One of the first contributions of Gaur to the science of geology came during his doctoral studies at Imperial College when he discovered the host rock effect in geo-electromagnetics, which had been unsuspected till then and this discovery assisted him in earning his PhD. His later studies covered the fields of geodesy, seismology and electromagnetics and his studies on the tectonics of Himalayas assisted in estimating the plate under-thrusts and understanding the micro-earthquakes in the region. He is credited with the discovery of the thick Deccan lithosphere which he accomplished using the seismic tomography experiments for the first time in India. He is reported to be the first scientist to use Global Positioning System Geodesy to measure the Indian plate velocity quantitatively in comparison to the Eurasian plate velocity and as well as the first to conduct an experiment to constrain global carbon fluxes in India and Central Asia through inversion of ultra-high precision atmospheric concentration data. His studies have been documented as several peer-reviewed articles, the article repository of the Indian Academy of Sciences has listed 61 of them. On the infrastructure development front, his contributions are reported in the implementation of Marine Satellite and Ocean Information Services and in the establishment of a CO2 laboratory at Indian Astronomical Observatory, Hanle. It was during his tenure as the professor, academic programs on signal analysis, inverse theory and computational geophysics were introduced at the University of Roorkee and the University Grants Commission of India subsequently extended the courses designed by him to other universities. His involvement is also known in the preparation of science texts for higher secondary studies of the Central Board of Secondary Education. He was one of the propagators of the Science to People programs and also sat in the councils of the Indian National Science Academy (1985–87 and 1994–96) and the Indian Academy of (Sciences 1992-97).
caption: Indian Astronomical Observatory
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