It is believed that Greater India migrated from the southern hemisphere, collided with Gondwanaland, Angaraland and Cathaysia, thereby closing an intervening oceanic Tethys along the Indus-Yarlung-Tsangpo Suture Zone (IYTSZ).The suture zone is placed along the Chaman Fault in the Baluchistan-Afghanistan area in the west, and the Indus-Yarlung-Tsangpo in the north, whereas along the east from Th...

Wang et al. (Reports, 21 November, 2014, p. 978) describe a buried canyon upstream of the Yarlung Tsangpo Gorge and argue that rapid erosion of the gorge was merely a passive response to rapid uplift at ~2.5 million years ago (Ma). We view these data as an expected consequence emerging from feedbacks between erosion and crustal rheology active well before 2.5 Ma.

The Yarlung Tsangpo–Brahmaputra river drains a large portion of the Himalaya and southern Tibetan plateau, including the eastern Himalayan syntaxis, one of the most tectonically active regions on the globe. We measured the solute chemistry of 161 streams and major tributaries of the Tsangpo–Brahmaputra to examine the effect of tectonic, climatic, and geologic factors on chemical weathering rate...

We applied teleseismic tomography to investigate the 3D P-wave velocity (Vp) structure of crust and upper mantle at depths 50–400 km beneath Yarlung–Tsangpo suture (YTS), by using 6164 relative travel-time residuals collected from 495 events recorded 20 three-component broadband seismograms. A modified multi-channel cross-correlation method was adopted automatically calculate arrival-time all e...

The Qinghai-Tibet Plateau (QTP) is a biodiversity hotspot, resulting from its geological history, contemporary environment and isolation. Uplift of the QTP and Quaternary climatic oscillations are hypothesised to have influenced the genetic diversity, population structure and dynamics of all QTP endemic species. In this study, we tested this hypothesis by assaying variation at two mitochondrial...

The Himalayan mountains are dissected by some of the deepest and most impressive gorges on Earth. Constraining the interplay between river incision and rock uplift is important for understanding tectonic deformation in this region. We report here the discovery of a deeply incised canyon of the Yarlung Tsangpo River, at the eastern end of the Himalaya, which is now buried under more than 500 met...

In the Katha Range of central Myanmar, lithologic tracers and pressure-temperature-deformation-time data identify Cambro-Ordovician, Indian-affinity Tethyan Himalaya Series, located ∼700 km from their easternmost outcrop in S-Tibet, ∼450 Himalayan rocks Eastern Syntaxis. Metamorphism began at ∼65 Ma, peaked ∼45 Ma (∼510°C, 0.93 GPa), exhumation/cooling (∼25°C/Myr) occurred until ∼30 a subductio...

High-grade gneisses (amphibolite–granulite facies) of the Namche Barwa and Gyala Peri massifs, in the eastern Himalayan syntaxis, have been unroofed from metamorphic depths in the late Tertiary–Recent. Rapid exhumation (2–5 mm year) has resulted in a pronounced shallow conductive thermal anomaly beneath the massifs and the intervening Tsangpo gorge. The position of the 300 !C isotherm has been ...