Abstract:
A Mountain is a large landform that upsurges above the adjoining land surface in a
limited area, most commonly in the form of peaks driven by tectonic forces and
volcanism. The basic mountains types formed by tectonic plates include block,
volcanic and fold mountains. As portions of Earth's crust move and crumple, an uplift
pressure is created by compressional forces which intrudes the igneous matter
and forces the rock surface upwards, resulting in the creation of landform referred as
mountains. The degree of height of the landform classifies it into a hill or, if the
elevation is higher and steeper, a mountain. The outcrop of mountain encompasses
all or some of joints, bedding planes, cleavage, fractures, and zones of shear
collectively known as discontinuity. The measurement of discontinuity orientations is
of absolute importance in evaluating the discontinuous rock slopes stability and
behavior of rock mass because of their use as input in discontinuity modelling
programs and methods. Commonly, Discontinuity orientations are gauged manually
with the help of a compass. In this day and age, this manual method has its fair
share of drawbacks which include the fact that this method is slow, tiring, and a
serious threat of physical danger looms from rock falls and landslides. Also this
method can yield inaccurate results due to the fact that scaling of heights and its
measurements are restricted to accessible areas only.
Nexus to above, this research is aimed at detection, mapping and then
characterization of discontinuities with remotely sensed data and GIS applications.
Research analysis was based on data acquisition, image processing, lineament
extraction, raster analysis of Digital elevation model and Geometrical calculations in
GIS to extract discontinuity and its characterization. The research was based on
data from United States Geological Survey earth explorer application available free
worldwide.
The results obtained were compared with obtained from digitization of Geological
maps of area of study. The inherent inaccuracies and deviations were identified with
reasons of their occurrence. The recommendations were made in response to
reasons causing inaccuracies to carve precise results. The research of was carried
out with limitations in accuracy of free data available and software on trial license
