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ABSTRACT
Konkan is the coastal lowland extending east-west from the Arabian Sea to the Western Ghat escarpment and north-south from north of Mumbai to north of Goa. The city Malvan is located in Sindhudurg district and bounded by three creeks viz., Karli, Kolamb, and Kalavli, of which Karli and Kalavli are the major rivers giving sediment input for this coast. The place is well known for the Sindhudurg Island Fort built by the Maratha King Shivaji during the 16th century and is crowded by tourists during the fair-weather season. The present study is a preliminary work and emerged while carrying out remote sensing application on the southern coast of Maharashtra. Hence, the present report does not have detailed in situ/field data. The remote sensing data provide significant information regarding physical setting, tectonic features, and coastal landforms, especially the large-scale morphological features such as beach ridges, spits, bars, islands, barrier beaches, and lagoons. In the present study, beach ridges and lineaments were observed along the Malvan coast and have been utilized to understand the evolution of the Malvan coast. Along with this, coastal erosion/accretion and landform/land cover classification have also been undertaken using remote sensing data.
ADDITIONAL INDEX WORDS: Beaches, lineaments, land use, coastal evolution.
INTRODUCTION
The coast of Maharashtra stretches 720 km in length. The Konkan region along the Sahyadri Ranges on India's west coast is internationally acclaimed for its sun and sand, making it a heavenly abode (SATHE and CHAUHAN, 2003). Apart from the beautiful beaches and island forts, the coast is also well known as the king of fruits-mangoes, cashew nuts and kokam-which in turn attracts a lot of tourists and traders, making this a busy stretch all through the year. The coast here has distinct morphological features from the rest of the Indian coast (CHANDRAMOHAN, ANAND, and NAYAK, 1992) and has a unique combination of nature's endowment, with scenic beauty of bays, beaches, islands, and forts. The coastal ecosystem here is unique and divergent owing to the diverse geological and geomorphological processes such as tectonic, fluvial, coastal, and aeolian processes. These processes, which have acted in varying degrees and duration during the Quaternary Period, have left their imprints in the form of various geomorphic features along the coast such as...