Fifty‐five million years of Tibetan evolution recorded in the Indus Fan

Abstract

Although the Indus Fan is only about one‐third of the volume of its giant neighbor in the Bay of Bengal, it is one of the largest sediment bodies in the ocean basins, totaling ∼5×106 km3. Its detrital sedimentary record is an important repository of information on the uplift and erosion of the western Himalaya. New seismic and provenance data from the Pakistan margin now suggest that the Indus River and fan system was initiated shortly after the India‐Asia collision at ˜5 Ma.The modern Indus drainage basin is dominated by the high peaks of the Karakoram, Kohistan, and other tectonic units of the Indus Suture Zone rather than the High Himalaya. The Indus River, which rises in western Tibet near Mount Kailas, follows the Indus Suture Zone along strike before cutting orthogonally through the Himalaya to the Arabian Sea. The other tributaries to the Indus, such as the Chenab and Sutlej, do drain the crystalline High Himalayan range, but do so in an area where its topography is much reduced (Figure 1). In contrast, the Bengal Fans main feeder rivers, the Ganges and Brahmaputra, follow the High Himalaya along strike for much of the length of the orogen. In practice, this means that the Bengal Fan is swamped by the large volume of material derived from the rapidly unroofing High Himalaya [France‐Lanord et al, 1993], while the Indus Fan is dominated by tectonic units adjacent to the suture zone, including western Tibet. This allows their erosional signal to be more readily isolated in the Indus Fan compared to in the Bengal.