G6-BOULDER  RIDDEN HILLS-1

 By PragyanSharma Polavarapu

The beautiful boulder ridden bare hills of this upland region( in Nalgonda district of Telangana state ) have indescribable beauty and are in complete contrast to the thickly forested high hills of Godavari area. The bare hills and the dozens of big boulders lying near the hills make the area look very pleasing to the eye under the blue skies and fluffy white clouds and the green farm lands.

 The boulders do not have any sharp edges and are rounded at the corners due to lying for millions of years in heat and cold and due to erosion in strong winds, sand storms and torrential rains for millions of years.  Millions of little stone crystals   of the size of sand particles get separated from the boulders and fall down unseen all through the year. The boulder surface disintegrates slowly in decades and centuries and millenniums. These boulders saw rise and fall of countless dynasties of kings, filling and drying of thousands of lakes and ponds, growth and disappearance of vast forests. Near almost every village there are little boulder ridden hillocks of small height with little bushes and green grass all around. In the hills thousands of the short bushes of “Seethaphal " plant (custard apple plant) grow wild.

Here in many rural areas near  Warangal, Nalgonda ,Karimnagar and rural Hyderabad some boulders  of the size of cars or rooms  and some even of size of three or four- storeyed buildings, which are rounded during millions of years of weathering into very rough elliptical and spherical shapes, are found standing in precarious positions on stony ground .The stony ground may be rally upper surface of gigantic horizontally lying boulder sunk in earth since millions of years under layers of soil and sand.

Geology is the science dealing with creation of mountains, hills, seas, rivers etc tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of years ago. In this science time is not measured in decades, centuries and millenniums.  These units are too small and units like ten million years and hundred million years are required. Inside the earth there is terrible heat locked since 4500 million years (four hundred and fifty crore years). It can melt rocks but is tightly sealed under hundreds or even thousands of miles thick rock layers. It is like coconut water contained inside the coconut which has many layers beneath the outer shell.

Only above this thousands-miles-thick rock shells our vast  oceans(the Pacific, Atlantic etc) and continents, lands, mountains, forests, rivers and lakes exist and towns and villages flourish. But there are small insignificant fissures  in this thousand mile thick rock shell .Through these narrow fissures in the hard stone layers (like hair thin fissures we see in a wall) the lava or hot melted rock ever present under the thick rock layers comes out and creates volcanoes.