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Nature Geoscience 1, 494–496 (1 August 2008) | doi:10.1038/ngeo268

Environmental science: Arsenic meets dense populations

Alexander van Geen

The floodplains of the Tigris and the Euphrates, the Nile and the Indus allowed major civilizations to blossom, thanks to riverine soil nutrients that sustained high levels of agricultural production. It is therefore not by chance that deltas and floodplains of several South Asian rivers draining the Himalayas coincide today with some of the world's densest rural populations (Fig.