A 3,180-kilometre suture-zone river named a subcontinent
The Indus runs about 3,180 kilometres from Tibet’s Sengge Zangbo northwest through disputed Kashmir and the length of Pakistan to the Arabian Sea. Its roughly 1,120,000 square-kilometre basin and ~175 cubic kilometres yearly flow rank among the world’s fifty largest rivers by discharge.
Its length is contested. The 1909 Imperial Gazetteer said just over 1,800 miles, many modern works use 2,880 kilometres, Britannica switched to the longer figure in 2015, and a Chinese team in 2011 proposed about 3,600 using satellite imagery and a small lake northeast of Mount Kailash as the source. Tradition instead starts it at Sênggê Kanbab, the Lion’s Mouth spring marked by chortens.
The upper river follows the Indus-Yarlung suture, the seam where India struck Eurasia around 50 million years ago, and it is antecedent, older than the Himalayas and cutting down as they rose. It swings around Nanga Parbat through gorges 4,500 to 5,200 metres deep, fills the Tarbela Reservoir, meets the Kabul near Attock, and below Mithankot takes in the Panjnad, which gathers the Jhelum, Chenab, Ravi, Beas and Sutlej. In Ladakh the Zanskar actually carries more water than the Indus above their meeting. Snow and glaciers feed it, flows swell from July to September, and it is one of the few rivers with a tidal bore; after an 1816 earthquake it shifted west away from the Rann of Kutch.
Harappa and Mohenjo-daro date to around 3300 BC, and over 1,052 Indus Valley settlements are known, from Sutkagan Dor near Iran to Alamgirpur just 28 kilometres from Delhi. The Rigveda calls the river Sindhu 176 times, and Old Persian Hindu passed through Greek into Latin, giving both Indus and India. Darius sent Scylax of Caryanda to explore it around 515 BC, Alexander’s troops turned back along its lower course, and his admiral Nearchus sailed from its delta toward the Tigris.
Today Punjab, the land of five rivers, grows most of Pakistan’s crops on its water, which also supplies most of the country’s drinking water. Local names include Sher Darya among Pashtuns and Mehran among Sindhis. The endemic Indus river dolphin, the first side-swimming cetacean described, survives in five pockets split by barrages.
Source: Indus River
