Looking out over the Grand Canyon in Arizona is surely enough to take most visitors’ breath away. Despite its fame, however, the Grand Canyon is neither the longest nor the deepest canyon on Earth.
While the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean is indisputably the deepest anywhere on the planet, the terrestrial winner is China’s Yarlung Tsangpo Grand Canyon. It’s 314 miles (505 km) long, which makes it 37 miles (60 km) longer than Arizona’s Grand Canyon, and has an average depth of 7,440 feet (2,270 m).
In a particularly rugged stretch between the high Himalayan peaks of Namcha Barwa and Gyala Peri, the canyon’s deepest point is found at 19,715 feet (6,009 m), which is around three times the depth of the Grand Canyon.
The Yarlung Tsangpo Grand Canyon is located in the Tibet Autonomous Region and named for the Yarlung Tsangpo River. Dubbed the “Everest of rivers,” the Yarlung Tsangpo has its headwaters at Angsi Glacier and has the highest average elevation of any river on Earth, at 13,000 feet (4,000 m). It crosses the Tibetan Plateau and ultimately joins with the Brahmaputra to the southwest. Combined with powerful tectonic forces that caused the uplift of the Earth’s crust some three million years ago, the steep path of the Yarlung Tsangpo has resulted in serious erosion, creating the great depths of the canyon.
The wonders of the other Grand Canyon:
- Asia’s tallest known tree, thought to be a South Tibetan cypress, stands in Yarlung Tsangpo Grand Canyon. It towers at an incredible 335 feet (102 m).
- Due to its rugged location, the Yarlung Tsangpo Grand Canyon, also known as the Brahmaputra Canyon or the Tsangpo Gorge, has been the focus of relatively limited exploration. It is home to numerous unique ecosystems across multiple vegetation zones, including lowland tropical forests, laurel forests, temperate coniferous, boreal forests, scrubland, and tundra.
- Although the Chinese government has designated the Yarlung Tsangpo Grand Canyon a “national reservation,” it has also drafted plans to create an enormous dam to harness the river’s potential for hydroelectric power. If created, it would generate 50,000 megawatts of electricity, double the output of the Three Gorges Dam, yet would also displace numerous populations and ecosystems downstream, especially in India and Bangladesh.
