As previously noted, karst landscapes owe their existence to the removal of bedrock in solution and to the development of underground drainage without the development of surface stream valleys.
Karst landscapes are formed by the removal of bedrock (composed in most cases of limestone, dolomite, gypsum, or salt, but in some cases of such normally insoluble rocks as quartzite and granite) in solution through underground routes rather than through surface weathering and surface streams.
Deformations within the ice itself are excluded, as are processes of glacial erosion, such as plucking of bedrock and the particle-by-particle removal and transport of sediment by glacier ice.
The bedrock is a Triassic shell limestone (Muschelkalk) with characteristic top soil removal.
Steady-state regolith or soil thickness (SSST), whereby surface removals are approximately balanced by production of new soil by bedrock weathering, is a common assumption in most models of hillslope and landscape evolution.
Because these are detrital grains and not bedrock, we can be confident that this pattern is not a preservation issue linked to the removal of old material from the metamorphic rocks in the Greater Himalaya themselves but represents a real difference in the erosion history along the mountain chain.
The alvar areas, therefore, result from a combination of naturally thin soils on limestone pavement bedrock, grazing by larger mammals, and continuous human impact for thousands of years, particularly through livestock grazing regimes and removal of firewood.
SSST is thus only applicable to soils formed chiefly from weathering of the underlying bedrock, where sufficient time has elapsed for regolith accumulation, and where effects of processes other than weathering and surface removals on thickness are negligible.
Trade, its bedrock, is thriving.
Yet the bedrock is crumbling.
