The Qinghai-Tibet Plateau occupies an enormous area of Asia and is known as the Roof of the World, owing to an average elevation that exceeds 4,500m.

Located at the heart of the Himalayas, the plateau is home to the headwaters of several of the world’s largest rivers, including the Brahmaputra, Indus, Mekong, Yellow, and Yangtze.

However, new research by an international team of scientists has found that changes in the global climate are altering the behaviour of those and other rivers as they flow from the mountains towards some of the world’s most populated coastlines.

That is also influencing the huge quantities of sediment the rivers carry, and these changes are more varied than the research team had anticipated before they began their study.

Published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, the study was carried out by joint team from the universities of Wuhan, Sichuan, Beijing Normal, Colombia, Edinburgh and Plymouth.