Place · braided river & quake zone · India
Brahmaputra braid & 1950 quake
Also known as Brahmaputra, Luit, Jamuna, Assam earthquake 1950
The Brahmaputra carries one of the heaviest sediment loads of any river and runs in a braid plain up to fifteen kilometres wide across Assam. The magnitude 8.6 Assam earthquake of 15 August 1950 raised its bed sharply and made the flooding and bank erosion of the following decades worse.
- Function
- Landscape & environmental change
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 26.750, 93.500 (approximate)
Worth knowing
Majuli, the largest river island in the valley, has lost more than half its area since the nineteenth century, and its satras have been physically moved as the bank retreated. River erosion in Assam is measured in square kilometres of land lost per year, not in flood heights.
Connections (2)
- Succession in timeTista
The Tista's capture in 1787 and the Brahmaputra's shift from the Old Brahmaputra channel to its present Jamuna course happened within the same few years of catastrophic flooding. Two of the largest rivers in the world changed beds almost simultaneously, and the Company had to resurvey the districts around both. Rennell's atlas, drawn just before, is the control.
- River flowMajuli
Majuli's erosion is the Brahmaputra's sediment budget expressed as land loss. The 1950 earthquake raised the bed and increased the load, the braid channels migrate every monsoon, and the island has gone from roughly twelve hundred square kilometres to under five hundred. Satras founded by Shankaradeva's successors have been moved bodily inland, some of them more than once.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Brahmaputra River”. M.C. Poddar, Preliminary Report on the Assam Earthquake of 15 August 1950 (Geological Survey of India); Brahmaputra Board erosion surveys.
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