Indus River
Cradle of an ancient civilization, lifeline of Pakistan
The Indus gave its name to India and to one of humanity's earliest urban civilizations, yet today it is overwhelmingly the river of Pakistan, whose farms and cities depend on it almost completely. From a sacred spring near Mount Kailash on the Tibetan Plateau it cuts through the western Himalaya, gathers the five rivers of the Punjab and runs the length of Pakistan to the Arabian Sea. In a country that is mostly desert, the Indus is the difference between barrenness and harvest.
The river runs about 3,180 kilometers from its Tibetan source to the sea. In its upper reaches it carves some of the deepest gorges on Earth, plunging between the giant peaks of the Karakoram and the Himalaya around Nanga Parbat. Emerging onto the plains it is joined by the Punjab's tributaries, the Jhelum, Chenab, Ravi, Beas and Sutlej, the rivers that give the region its name. Below them it crosses the Sindh desert in a single broad channel and ends in a wide delta of mangroves and shifting mouths on the Arabian Sea.
Along its valley the Bronze Age cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-daro built sophisticated brick streets and drains more than four thousand years ago. In the modern era the river has been engineered into one of the largest irrigation systems in the world, its waters partitioned between India and Pakistan by the Indus Waters Treaty of 1960. Heavy diversion now leaves little to reach the sea, shrinking the delta, while glacial melt and monsoon swings make the river's future supply increasingly uncertain.