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Research published on Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience points to a surprising cause: a river, stolen long ago by another marauding waterway.
Rivers are agents of erosion, but their consumption of land can have unexpected effects. About 89,000 years ago, a powerful river annexed another one nearby. Combined, the two grew more erosive. This led to the washing away of far more of the Himalayan landscape, and a huge weight was shorn from the crust, the layer of Earth we live on.
Article title is awfully misleading. Crustal rebound is very cool and all, but its not as relevant for the Himalaya since the overwhelming majority of the uplift there is coming from the continued subduction of the Indian plate beneath the Eurasian one. The article says the river erosion added 50-165 ft in the past 89,00 years which may be true, but it pales in comparison to the collision of the plates, which has raised the range around three thousand feet in that same time, and is the real reason Everest is growing every year. The Rocky Mountains on the other hand have no active plate tectonics, which means erosion is the only reason they are slowly continuing to rise. Not knocking the science cited by the article, just the conclusion the article author has jumped to in the title.
