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Yarlung Tsangpo Grand Canyon
The deepest canyon on Earth, where a Tibetan river knifes through the Himalaya
The deepest canyon on the planet lies hidden in the eastern Himalaya, where the Yarlung Tsangpo River makes a violent hairpin turn and slices through the mountains in a gorge of almost unimaginable depth. Walls drop as much as 6,000 metres from the snow peaks above to the churning river below, three times the depth of the Grand Canyon. Long one of Earth's least-explored places, the Yarlung Tsangpo Grand Canyon is a realm of waterfalls, gorges, and forest clinging to near-vertical slopes.
The canyon was carved where the Yarlung Tsangpo, which runs for hundreds of kilometres across the high Tibetan Plateau, suddenly turns and plunges off the plateau toward the lowlands of India, where it becomes the Brahmaputra. The river drops steeply between two giant peaks, Namcha Barwa at 7,782 metres and Gyala Peri across the gorge, and the canyon reaches its deepest at around 6,009 metres, with an average depth well over 2,000 metres. At about 505 kilometres it is also slightly longer than the Grand Canyon.
The gorge's extreme depth creates a corridor that funnels warm, moist air from the Indian monsoon deep into the Himalaya, nurturing a startling range of life from subtropical forest to alpine meadow within a few vertical kilometres. Long a near-mythical blank on maps, its inner reaches were not fully traversed until expeditions in the late twentieth century braved its rapids and cliffs. Today its remoteness, biodiversity, and the prospect of giant hydropower on the river make it one of the most consequential canyons on Earth.