The Ayeyarwady River
Résumé
The Ayeyarwady River flows for 2170 km to the Andaman Sea from above 3000 m altitude in the Eastern Himalayan Syntaxis. The Ayeyarwady is one of the largest river systems in the world in terms of water and sediment discharge. The Ayeyarwady floodplains have supported agriculture through the Neolithic and successive urban civilizations since the late Iron Age. The drainage basin of the Ayeyarwady River is bounded by the Indo-Burman Ranges to the west, southeastern Tibet to the north, and Yunnan highlands and the Shan Plateau to the east. The Ayeyarwady basin includes a large variety of montane, alpine, temperate, and subtropical forest ecosystems. Sedimentary provenance studies of geological units in the central Myanmar basins have shed a partial light on the sequence of regional denudation. Damming of rivers in the Ayeyarwady basin are planned to upsurge with potential negative consequences for water and sediment loads reaching downstream.