Exciting discoveries have come from an international drilling project, the Deep Sea Drilling Project. Since 1968, a drill ship, the Glomar Challenger, has drilled nearly a thousand holes into the deep ocean basins, taking samples of deep-sea sediment and crust. One early discovery suggests that the Mediterranean dried up completely between 5 and 12 million years ago, leaving thick beds of sun-baked salts as evidence buried in today’s ocean floor.
From the late 1930s, new techniques have opened up in submarine geology. Gravity measurements and geotectonic imagery have allowed accurate mapping of the sea surface and the bottom structure of the oceans. The ocean floor, far from being smooth and flat, is marked by huge mountain ranges – the mid-ocean ridge that form part of a global network which extends for more than 80,000 km. In places such as Iceland, Ascension and the Galapagos Islands, the ridges rise above sea level.
The ocean floor is also cut by deep trenches which mark subduction zones and are punctuated by isolated seamounts. Because a mid-ocean ridge is submerged at very deep depths in the ocean, its existence was not even known until the 1950s, when it was discovered by Vema, a ship of the Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory of Columbia University, that traversed the Atlantic Ocean and recorded data about the ocean floor from the ocean surface.
The mountain range was named the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. At first, it was thought to be a phenomenon specific to the Atlantic Ocean, because nothing like such a massively-long undersea mountain chain had ever been discovered before. However, as surveys of the ocean floor continued to be conducted around the world, it was discovered that every ocean contained parts of the mid-ocean ridge.
The discovery of what mid-ocean ridge systems represented, the sites of crust formation, or constructive plate margins, was a major breakthrough in earth sciences. Basaltic volcanism, upwelling of magma consisting mainly of basalt characterises ocean ridge.
Convective movements within the mantle force the overlying lithosphere move apart, allowing hot magma to reach the sea floor. At ridge crests, a zone of rifting separates regions of sea floor which are moving apart at 2-15 centimetres per year.
Because the oceanic crust cannot withstand sufficient stress to allow for variations in spreading rate and changes in convection pattern, ocean ridge consist of straight sections offset by transform faults, along which different sections of a plate slide past each other. This phenomenon is known to be caused by convection currents in the plastic, very weak upper mantle, or asthenosphere.
One of the key pieces of information came from paleomagnetic studies along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. It was found that only half the rocks on each side of the ridge-axis near Iceland showed normal magnetic polarity; the remainder had a reversed polarity.
The pattern of normal and reversed polarity was manifested in a magnetic striping of the oceanic crust, mirrored on each side of the ridge crest. The alternating pattern of normal and reversed polarity rocks is produced as successive belts of lava are extruded at the site of a divergent plate margin. At the mid-ocean ridge and associated rift zones, the new sea floor is generated then carried away from the ridge-axis by lateral mantle motions.
When individual stripes were dated, it was found that the rocks became older with increasing distance from the crest. In other words, the sea floor was spreading apart. Such spreading characterises all ocean ridge where lithospheric plate divergence occurs. During the past 80 million years, the Atlantic has spread at a rate of 2 centimetres per year. About 4 cubic km of new crust is produced at mid-ocean ridge every year.
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Steve Ovett, the famous British middle-distance athlete, won the 800-metres gold medal at the Moscow Olympics of 1980. Just a few days later, he was about to win a 5,000-metres race at London’s Crystal Palace. Known for his burst of acceleration on the home stretch, he had supreme confidence in his ability to out-sprint rivals. With the final 100 metres remaining,
[wptelegram-join-channel link=”https://t.me/s/upsctree” text=”Join @upsctree on Telegram”]Ovett waved to the crowd and raised a hand in triumph. But he had celebrated a bit too early. At the finishing line, Ireland’s John Treacy edged past Ovett. For those few moments, Ovett had lost his sense of reality and ignored the possibility of a negative event.
This analogy works well for the India story and our policy failures , including during the ongoing covid pandemic. While we have never been as well prepared or had significant successes in terms of growth stability as Ovett did in his illustrious running career, we tend to celebrate too early. Indeed, we have done so many times before.
It is as if we’re convinced that India is destined for greater heights, come what may, and so we never run through the finish line. Do we and our policymakers suffer from a collective optimism bias, which, as the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman once wrote, “may well be the most significant of the cognitive biases”? The optimism bias arises from mistaken beliefs which form expectations that are better than the reality. It makes us underestimate chances of a negative outcome and ignore warnings repeatedly.
The Indian economy had a dream run for five years from 2003-04 to 2007-08, with an average annual growth rate of around 9%. Many believed that India was on its way to clocking consistent double-digit growth and comparisons with China were rife. It was conveniently overlooked that this output expansion had come mainly came from a few sectors: automobiles, telecom and business services.
Indians were made to believe that we could sprint without high-quality education, healthcare, infrastructure or banking sectors, which form the backbone of any stable economy. The plan was to build them as we went along, but then in the euphoria of short-term success, it got lost.
India’s exports of goods grew from $20 billion in 1990-91 to over $310 billion in 2019-20. Looking at these absolute figures it would seem as if India has arrived on the world stage. However, India’s share of global trade has moved up only marginally. Even now, the country accounts for less than 2% of the world’s goods exports.
More importantly, hidden behind this performance was the role played by one sector that should have never made it to India’s list of exports—refined petroleum. The share of refined petroleum exports in India’s goods exports increased from 1.4% in 1996-97 to over 18% in 2011-12.
An import-intensive sector with low labour intensity, exports of refined petroleum zoomed because of the then policy regime of a retail price ceiling on petroleum products in the domestic market. While we have done well in the export of services, our share is still less than 4% of world exports.
India seemed to emerge from the 2008 global financial crisis relatively unscathed. But, a temporary demand push had played a role in the revival—the incomes of many households, both rural and urban, had shot up. Fiscal stimulus to the rural economy and implementation of the Sixth Pay Commission scales had led to the salaries of around 20% of organized-sector employees jumping up. We celebrated, but once again, neither did we resolve the crisis brewing elsewhere in India’s banking sector, nor did we improve our capacity for healthcare or quality education.
Employment saw little economy-wide growth in our boom years. Manufacturing jobs, if anything, shrank. But we continued to celebrate. Youth flocked to low-productivity service-sector jobs, such as those in hotels and restaurants, security and other services. The dependence on such jobs on one hand and high-skilled services on the other was bound to make Indian society more unequal.
And then, there is agriculture, an elephant in the room. If and when farm-sector reforms get implemented, celebrations would once again be premature. The vast majority of India’s farmers have small plots of land, and though these farms are at least as productive as larger ones, net absolute incomes from small plots can only be meagre.
A further rise in farm productivity and consequent increase in supply, if not matched by a demand rise, especially with access to export markets, would result in downward pressure on market prices for farm produce and a further decline in the net incomes of small farmers.
We should learn from what John Treacy did right. He didn’t give up, and pushed for the finish line like it was his only chance at winning. Treacy had years of long-distance practice. The same goes for our economy. A long grind is required to build up its base before we can win and celebrate. And Ovett did not blame anyone for his loss. We play the blame game. Everyone else, right from China and the US to ‘greedy corporates’, seems to be responsible for our failures.
We have lowered absolute poverty levels and had technology-based successes like Aadhaar and digital access to public services. But there are no short cuts to good quality and adequate healthcare and education services. We must remain optimistic but stay firmly away from the optimism bias.
In the end, it is not about how we start, but how we finish. The disastrous second wave of covid and our inability to manage it is a ghastly reminder of this fact.