Recent research

Controls on the preservation of the Tibetan Plateau edge

Here we address one interdisciplinary key issue pertinent to the evolution of the southeastern Tibetan Plateau margin: Why is it still there? Despite hosting one of the deepest gorges on Earth, the plateau edge is extremely well defined, and according to widely accepted stream-power theory, should be fated to be heavily dissected by one of Asia’s most powerful monsoon-drenched bedrock rivers. We show that presently dwindling, though highly active, glaciers were large enough during the Holocene to stall aggressive river downcutting along the plateau margin, elucidating a strikingly focused feedback between climate, tectonics, and extreme erosion in the eastern Himalayan syntaxis.

This inaccessible region is one of the least known in High Asia, challenging scientists across all disciplines to unravel its mysteries by considering close and partly unexpected feedbacks between geophysical processes on both sides of the Earth’s surface. The novel idea that glacier dynamics, during warmer climatic periods in particular, contribute to restricting bedrock river erosion to a bull’s-eye region of tremendous rates of erosion and concomitant rock uplift, is provocative and extends the common portrait of glaciers as passive victims of global warming. Quite the contrary, glaciers may have served to sustain the region’s stunning tectonic aneurysm.

Read more:
Korup, O., Montgomery, D.R., 2008. Tibetan Plateau river incision inhibited by glacial stabilization of the Tsangpo gorge. Nature 455, 786-789, doi:10.1038/nature07322