and
Gyala Peri. The picture is centered on The Yarlung Tsangpo River is the highest major river in the world. Its longest tributary is the
Nyang River. Major
tributaries of Yarlung Tsangpo include Nyangchu River,
Lhasa River,
Nyang River, and
Parlung Tsangpo. In Tibet the river flows through the South Tibet Valley, which is approximately long and wide. The valley descends from above sea level to . As it descends, the surrounding vegetation changes from cold
desert to arid
steppe to deciduous scrub vegetation. It ultimately changes into
conifer and
rhododendron forest. The tree line is approximately at .
Sedimentary sandstone rocks found near the Tibetan capital of
Lhasa contain grains of
magnetic minerals that record the Earth's alternating
magnetic field current. The basin of the Yarlung River, bounded by the
Himalayas in the south and
Kang Rinpoche and
Nyenchen Tanglha Mountains in the north, has less severe climate than the adjacent northern (and higher-altitude) parts of Tibet, and is home to most of the population of the
Tibetan Autonomous Region. The
Yarlung Tsangpo Grand Canyon, formed by a horse-shoe bend in the river where it leaves the
Tibetan Plateau and flows around
Namcha Barwa, is the deepest, and possibly longest canyon in the world. The Yarlung Tsangpo River has three major waterfalls in its course. The largest waterfall of the river, the "Hidden Falls", was not publicized in the West until 1998, when its sighting by Westerners was briefly hailed as a "discovery". They were even portrayed as the discovery of the great falls which had been the topic of stories told to early westerners by Tibetan hunters and
Buddhist monks, but which had never been found by Western explorers at the time. The Chinese authorities contradicted, however, saying that Chinese geographers, who explored the gorge from 1973 on, had already taken pictures of the falls in 1987 from a helicopter. ==Kayak exploration==