The Bengal Fan, also known as the Ganges Fan, is the largest submarine fan on Earth. It is located in the Bay of Bengal, being about 3,000 km long, 1,430 km wide with a maximum thickness of 16.5 km. The fan resulted from the uplift and erosion of the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau produced by the collision between the Indian Plate and the Eurasian …The Bengal Fan, also known as the Ganges Fan, is the largest submarine fan on Earth. It is located in the Bay of Bengal, being about 3,000 km long, 1,430 km wide with a maximum thickness of 16.5 km. The fan resulted from the uplift and erosion of the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau produced by the collision between the Indian Plate and the Eurasian Plate. Most of the sediment is supplied by the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers which supply the Lower Meghna delta in Bangladesh and the Hooghly delta in West Bengal. Several other large rivers in Bangladesh and India provide smaller contributions. Turbidity currents have transported the sediment through a series of submarine canyons, some of which are more than 1,500 miles in length, to be deposited in the Bay of Bengal up to 30 degrees latitude from where it began. To date, the oldest sediments recovered from the Bengal fan are from Early Miocene age. Their mineralogical and geochemical characteristics confirm their Himalayan origin and demonstrate that the Himalaya was already a major mountain range 20 million years ago.
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