The Indo-Gangetic plain as an ancient sea silted up (al-Biruni)
La llanura del Indo y el Ganges como antiguo mar colmatado (al-Biruni)
- Date
- c. 1030 · confidence medium
- Place
- Ghazni, Afghanistan
- Credited to
- Abu Rayhan al-Biruni
- Field
- Cosmos & Earth
What was discovered
In his work on India, al-Biruni argued that the Indo-Gangetic plain had been a sea filled in by river alluvium: near the mountains there are boulders and pebbles, and farther away ever finer sand and silt. It is an early case of reasoning about landscape history from sediments.
Recognised by historians of science (Said, Hasan, Nasr) as geological reasoning, though al-Biruni sets it out inside an ethnographic study; the work's dating is approximate (around 1030).
What it led to
- an Islamic precursor of fluvial sedimentology
- the idea that relief and coasts change over time, taken up by Avicenna and Shen Kuo