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This press release is copyright Nature. VOL.438 NO.7070 DATED 15 DECEMBER 2005
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* Hydrogeology: When rivers ran backwards
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[1] Hydrogeology: When rivers ran backwards (pp1001-1003; N&V)
The Indus river, Pakistan's major river, supplied water to one of the
earliest of all human civilizations, and gave its name to India. But
according to a paper in this week's Nature by Peter Clift and Jerzy
Blusztajn, it was once fed by a source different from today's.
The Indus begins in the mountainous Karakoram region of Pakistan. But much
of its water is carried from the western Himalayas in Tibet by four big
rivers that flow through the Punjab to meet the Indus in central Pakistan.
This, however, is a relatively new situation. By looking at the thickness
and chemical composition of sediments carried by the Indus into the Arabian
Sea over the past 30 million years - now deposited on the sea bed as
sedimentary rock - Clift and Blusztajn find that there must have been a
change in the sediment source about five million years ago. Before that
time, the sediments seem to be characteristic of the Karakoram mountains;
afterwards, they bear the imprint of material from the western Himalayas.
The researchers conclude that this change happened because the Indus valley
'captured' the Punjabi rivers, which had previously been flowing east into
the Ganges basin. They think that the rerouting might have been caused by
plate-tectonic movements that tilted the Punjabi rivers westwards. A related
News & Views article by Philip A. Allen accompanies this research.
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Peter P D Clift (University of Aberdeen, UK)
Tel: +44 1224 273456; E-mail: [email protected]
Philip Allen (Imperial College London, UK)
Tel: +44 20 7 594 7363; E-mail: [email protected]
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