River Piracy on the Tibetan Plateau
If you mention Tibet, there are several things that can come to mind. These include Mt. Everest, the Chinese communist invasion of Tibet in 1949-51, the "top of the world", Mahayana Buddhism, and other things. Oh, yes. We must remember the geology of the Tibetan Plateau — and river piracy. Credit: Jeff Schmaltz , MODIS Rapid Response Team, NASA / GSFC No, this river piracy is not about owlhoots on the waterways getting the drop on folks out for some recreation. We are going to discuss planation surfaces a bit more. You might recollect that these are flat surfaces (most dramatically at higher elevations) that uniformitarian geologists cannot adequately explain. River piracy is not performed by humans, but by rivers themselves (also called river capture ). Like planation itself, river capture is almost never observed today. Piracy is a word that describes what secularists do with real science, but we'll set that aside for today. A new model of river capture was p