News in Brief: Yangtze's age revealed
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/349900/description/News_in_Brief_Yangtzes_age_revealed
The worlds third longest river has a new age: The Yangtze River was in place by at least 23 million years ago, geologists report April 22 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The Yangtze stretches for 6,300 kilometers across China, from the Tibetan Plateau to the East China Sea. Geologists have debated the rivers age for more than a century, with estimates ranging from 2 million to 45 million years old.
A team led by Hongbo Zheng of Nanjing Normal University in China investigated the Yangtzes antiquity by studying rocks in the Jianghan Basin, which the river flows through downstream of the Three Gorges Dam. The researchers found rocks there that appear similar to the rivers modern sediments and dated them to roughly 23 million years ago. Older sediments which cant form in the presence of flowing water put an upper limit on the Yangtzes age of 36.5 million years.
The researchers say the timing of the Yangtzes birth corresponds with changes in Chinas topography caused by the uplift of the Tibetan Plateau. Asias summer monsoon rains also intensified around that time, which would have fed the fledgling river.