Extreme Geodynamics at the Tsangpo Gorge

If you aim at understanding what shapes the surface of the Earth, the Tsangpo Gorge (Eastern syntax of the Himalayas) will inevitably become one of your favorite places.

This is the place where bedrock is
being eroded at the fastest
measured rate of nearly 1 mm/yr.
The uncommonly vertical valley
walls adopt this high angle to cope
by landsliding with the incision rates
produced by water. 

This is the place on Earth where one of the the highest bedrock erosion rates, the fastest tectonic uplift, and some of the highest topographic gradients have been measured. Every year, nearly 1 cm of very hard metamorphic rock is dig by the Tsangpo River, which descends from an elevation of >3000 m near the Tibetan plateau, to a mere 1000 m in less than 100 km. An average water discharge above 1400 m3/s, together with the pronounced slope, implies a huge erosion power.
Upstream from this gorge, there are widespread terraces and shore sediments of a lake that used to cover a few hundred kilometers of the river valley and impounded up to 800 km3 of water in a lake. What caused this impoundment is a matter of discussion: Only the tectonic uplift along the gorge? Or also an increase in landsliding from the valley flanks during the Pleistocene? Or glacial moraine accumulations?
The long duration of this competition between uplift and erosion (at least 10 Myr) implies that the region must be approximately in equilibrium, so uplift rates are presumably in the range of a cm per year, only comparable to the post-glacial isostatic rebound of Scandinavia.

A recent study of the infill of those lake sediments concludes that the steepening of the Tsangpo Gorge started about 2 to 2.5 million years ago as a consequence of a faster rock uplift: 

(A) Longitudinal river profile of the Tsangpo River, location of drill cores with observed depth to bedrock (vertical black bars), estimated depth to bedrock (yellow area), and reconstructed valley bottom before uplift of Tsangpo Gorge (dashed line). (B) Hillslope angles at the river flanks, specific stream power, and landslide erosion rates. (C) Erosion rates of close to 10 mm/yr are reflected in the age at which the minerals cooled down while being exhumed towards the surface. From Wang et al., 2014, Science. 

The extreme uplift and exhumation rates have been linked to a feedback effect of erosion on channelizing crustal rock towards the surface (the so called tectonic aneurysm; Montgomery & Stolar, 2006).

In contrast, other studies favor the role of glacial transport from the high surrounding mountains near the gorge in blocking the river with glacial moraines. This may have triggered megafloods sourced at impoundments formed by glacial dams (Lang et al., 2013, Geology), since some of the largest known outburst floods in the world have also been reported here.

Tsangpo Gorge

Hence, the competition between tectonic uplift and erosion at the Tsangpo encompasses many of the big conundrums in present geomorphology and geodynamics: the importance of episodicity in landscape evolution, the implications of the glacial ages on erosion rates, the possible effects of climate on tectonic deformation...