Bengal Fan facts for kids
The Bengal Fan, also known as the Ganges Fan, is the biggest underwater fan on Earth. Imagine a giant triangle of mud and sand at the bottom of the ocean. That's what a submarine fan is! This one is super long, stretching about 3,000 kilometers (1,900 miles). It's also very wide, around 1,430 kilometers (890 miles). At its thickest point, it's an amazing 16.5 kilometers (10.3 miles) deep!
This massive fan was created over millions of years. It formed from tiny bits of rock and soil that washed down from the huge Himalayas mountains and the Tibetan Plateau. This happened because the Indian Plate and the Eurasian Plate crashed into each other. This collision pushed up the mountains and caused a lot of erosion.
Most of the mud and sand that makes up the Bengal Fan comes from two mighty rivers: the Ganges and the Brahmaputra. These rivers carry tons of sediment from the land and drop it into the ocean. This sediment then flows down to form the fan. The oldest parts of the fan are from a time called the Early Miocene age. That's about 23 to 16 million years ago!
Scientists first found this amazing underwater fan in the 1960s. Bruce C. Heezen and Marie Tharp used special equipment called bathymetric survey to map the ocean floor. They discovered the deep valleys and cone shapes of the fan. Later, in 1968, Joseph Curray and David Moore officially named it the Bengal Fan.
