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Reorganization of the western Himalayan river system after five million years ago

Nature volume 438, pages 1001–1003 (2005)Cite this article

Abstract

Uplift of mountains driven by tectonic forces can influence regional climate1,2 as well as regional drainage patterns, which in turn control the discharge of eroded sediment to the ocean3,4. But the nature of the interactions between tectonic forces, climate and drainage evolution remains contested5,6,7. Here we reconstruct the erosional discharge from the Indus river over the past 30 million years using seismic reflection data obtained from drill core samples from the Arabian Sea and neodymium isotope data. We find that the source of the Indus sediments was dominated by erosion within and north of the Indus suture zone until five million years ago; after that, the river began to receive more erosional products from Himalayan sources. We propose that this change in the erosional pattern is caused by a rerouting of the major rivers of the Punjab into the Indus, which flowed east into the Ganges river before that time. Seismic reflection profiles from the Indus fan suggest high mass accumulation rates during the Pleistocene epoch partly driven by increased drainage to the Indus river after five million years ago and partly by faster erosion linked to a stronger monsoon over the past four million years1. Our isotope stratigraphy for the Indus fan provides strong evidence for a significant change in the geometry of western Himalayan river systems in the recent geologic past.

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Figure 1: Topographic maps showing post- and pre-capture Indus drainage, together with locations of drill and seismic data.
Figure 2: The evolving Nd isotope composition and sedimentation rates on the Indus fan in relation to climatic and tectonic events known from onshore in Asia.

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Acknowledgements

P.D.C. thanks the Government of Pakistan and ConocoPhillips for access to the PAK77 survey data. We thank BGR (Hanover, Germany) for access to SO122 cruise data. N. Kusznir and A. Roberts are thanked for allowing us to use the Flex-Decomp backstripping software.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geology and Petroleum Geology, University of Aberdeen, AB24 3UE, Aberdeen, UK

    Peter D. Clift

  2. Department of Geology and Geophysics, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Massachusetts, 02543, Woods Hole, USA

    Jerzy Blusztajn

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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Peter D. Clift.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Figure

Four interpretations of multichannel seismic profiles from the outer Indus Shelf and upper slope. The revised sediment budget presented in this paper is based on these lines together with those already published by Clift et al. (23). The map shows the position of these lines relative to the other lines used for calculating the sediment budget and the location of the industrial drill sites that provide age control to the stratigraphy. (PDF 2149 kb)

Supplementary Methods

Text provides description of the analytical conditions used to generate the Nd isotope data and a description of how the sediment budgets were derived from seismic profiles. (DOC 50 kb)

Supplementary Table 1

Nd isotope composition of sediments considered in this study. (XLS 22 kb)

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Clift, P., Blusztajn, J. Reorganization of the western Himalayan river system after five million years ago. Nature 438, 1001–1003 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature04379

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