Question

Explain the Himalayan Rivers and its features

Answer 1

Main features of the Himalayan Rivers :
i. Himalayan rivers have large basins.
ii. Many of them make spectacular gorges.
iii. They are perennial in nature.
iv. They perform intensive erosional activities upstream and carry large amount of load of sand and silt.
v. In plains they iluw forming large meanders due to gentle scope.
vi. They form numerous depositional features like flood plain, river bluffs and levees.

Answer 2

The Himalayan mountain range or the Himalayas or Himalaya is a mountain range located in Asia, segregating the Tibetan Plateau from the Indian subcontinent. The Himalayan mountain range broadly includes the Hindu Kush, the Karakoram and other small mountain ranges that branch out from the Pamir Knot. Himalayan rivers are famous all over the world for their scenic beauties and tourist attractions located on their banks.

Himalayan Rivers: An overview
The Himalayan mountain range is home to the eight-thousanders (14 separate mountains that are 8,000 meters or above sea surface and include K2 (also known as the Savage Mountain or Godwin-Austen) and Mount Everest. Some of the famous rivers of the world including the Indus, Ganges, Yangtze, Brahmaputra, Salween, Mekong, Xunjiang Red River (Asia), Irrawaddy River, Chao Phraya, Syr Darya, Amu Darya, Tarim River and Yellow River have their sources in the Himalayas.

The collective catchment area of the Himalayan Rivers houses around 3 billion people (nearly 50% of the population of the world) in Bangladesh, Afghanistan, People's Republic of China, Bhutan, Nepal, India, Cambodia, Burma, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Thailand, Kyrgyzstan, Vietnam, Laos, Pakistan, and Malaysia.

Himalayan rivers are rich for their tourist attractions and cultural aspects. The mountain range covers approximately 15,000 glaciers, which function as the storehouse of approximately 12,000 km3 of freshwater. The Siachen Glacier located at the border of India and Pakistan is the second longest glacier in the world away from the glacial region of South Pole and North Pole. The length of Siachen glacier is 70 km. The forests on the banks of the Himalayan Rivers include Deodar, Pine, Oak, Fir, Birch, and Rhododendron.

Some of the other well-known glaciers include the Yamunotri and Gangotri (Uttarakhand), Baltoro and Biafo (Karakoram region), Nubra, Khumbu (Mount Everest region), and Zemu (Sikkim) glaciers.

The elevated areas of the Himalayan mountain range experience snowfalls round the year, regardless of their closeness to the tropical zones, and they are the sources for various big perennial rivers, majority of which merge into two big river systems:

(1) The western rivers merge into the Indus river basin and the Indus is the biggest among those rivers. The Indus originated in Tibet at the meeting point of Gar and Sengge rivers and runs towards the southwest across India and subsequently across Pakistan to the Arabian Sea. The river is fed by the Chenab, the Jhelum, the Beas, the Ravi, and the Sutlej rivers, among others.

(2) The majority of other rivers of the Himalayas sap the Ganges-Brahmaputra plains. The two major rivers are the Brahmaputra and the Ganges and the Yamuna, among other tributaries. The Brahmaputra starts off in the form of the Yarlung Tsangpo River in the western part of Tibet, and runs to the east across Tibet and west across the plateaus of Assam. The Brahmaputra and the Ganges join in Bangladesh, and pour into the Bay of Bengal across the biggest river delta in the world.

The eastern-most rivers of the Himalayas supply water to the Ayeyarwady river, which has its source in eastern Tibet and runs toward the south across Myanmar to pour into the Andaman Sea.

The Mekong, Salween, Huang He (Yellow River) and Yangtze, all have their sources in various areas of the Tibetan highland that are geographically separate from the Himalaya mountains, and are consequently not regarded as genuine rivers of the Himalayas. A number of geologists denote all the rivers jointly as the circum-Himalayan rivers.

Lately, geological scientists have observed a significant growth in the frequency of glacier retreat throughout the area due to universal weather variations. In spite of the fact that the outcome of this will not be identified for several years.