Brahmaputra
The mighty trans-Himalayan river, partner of the Ganges
The Brahmaputra makes one of the most extraordinary journeys of any river: rising in Tibet, it runs east for hundreds of kilometers behind the Himalaya, then turns and plunges through the deepest gorge on Earth before bursting onto the plains of India and Bangladesh. Wide, braided and prone to titanic floods, it joins the Ganges to build the world's largest delta. Few rivers change character so completely, from a high, cold Tibetan stream to a vast lowland flood whose channels shift from year to year.
The river runs roughly 2,900 kilometers from the Chemayungdung Glacier near Mount Kailash. As the Yarlung Tsangpo it flows east across southern Tibet, then bends sharply around the peak of Namcha Barwa and drops through the Yarlung Tsangpo Grand Canyon, deeper than the Grand Canyon, before emerging into the Indian state of Assam as the Brahmaputra. There it becomes an immense braided river, depositing and tearing away sand islands — Majuli, one of the largest, is steadily eroding. Joining the Ganges in Bangladesh, it helps form the delta that empties into the Bay of Bengal.
The Brahmaputra carries enormous quantities of water and sediment, supplying roughly half the flow of the combined Ganges-Brahmaputra system, and its monsoon floods both renew and devastate the densely settled lands it crosses. Its course through Tibet has made it strategically sensitive, with Chinese dam-building upstream raising concern in India and Bangladesh. For the people of Assam and Bengal the river is at once provider and threat, fertility and disaster delivered by the same annual rise.