The Yarlung-Tsangpo River in southern Asia drops rapidly
through the Himalaya Mountains on its way to the Bay of Bengal, losing about
7,000 feet of elevation through the precipitously steep Tsangpo Gorge.
For the first time, scientists have direct geochemical
evidence that the 150-mile long gorge, possibly the world’s deepest, was the
conduit by which megafloods from glacial lakes, perhaps half the volume of Lake
Erie, drained suddenly and catastrophically through the Himalayas when their
ice dams failed at times during the last 2 million years.