The active Bengal lobe complex as the modern terminal sink of Earth’s largest submarine fan
Abstract
The Bengal Fan, the world’s largest and among the few deep-sea fans still active today, has long been thought to have its active channel reaching the lower fan. Our findings reveal a middle-fan avulsion that shifted the terminal sediment sink 1,800 km landward, forming the modern terminal lobe complex. The lobes, dominated by sandy turbidites, are relatively thin (<20 m), but cover large areas (up to 1,350 km 2 ). Their evolution is strongly related to inherited topography and probably autogenic processes while external factors (e.g., monsoon and sea-level variation) control sediment supply and types of gravity flows. These lobes represent a small portion of the channel-levee-lobe system, as sediments mainly accumulated on the levees during Holocene highstand. Identifying the modern sink of the Bengal Fan provides a closure point for the Earth’s largest source-to-sink system, with implications for present-day fluxes of sediments, carbon, and marine litter across a vulnerable coastal region.
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BibTeX
@article{cornard2026active,
title = {{The active Bengal lobe complex as the modern terminal sink of Earth’s largest submarine fan}},
author = {Pauline H Cornard and Tilmann Schwenk and Greta Feddersen and Christian France-Lanord and Cecilia Mchugh and Till J J Hanebuth and Hermann R Kudrass and Nikolas Römer-Stange and Bingbing Wei and Walter Geibert and Anja Zander and Volkhard Spieß and Elda Miramontes},
journal = {Communications Earth \& Environment},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.1038/s43247-026-04037-2},
url = {https://hal.science/hal-05748263v1},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - JOUR
TI - The active Bengal lobe complex as the modern terminal sink of Earth’s largest submarine fan
AU - Pauline H Cornard
AU - Tilmann Schwenk
AU - Greta Feddersen
AU - Christian France-Lanord
AU - Cecilia Mchugh
AU - Till J J Hanebuth
AU - Hermann R Kudrass
AU - Nikolas Römer-Stange
AU - Bingbing Wei
AU - Walter Geibert
AU - Anja Zander
AU - Volkhard Spieß
AU - Elda Miramontes
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/10
JO - Communications Earth & Environment
DO - 10.1038/s43247-026-04037-2
UR - https://hal.science/hal-05748263v1
AB - The Bengal Fan, the world’s largest and among the few deep-sea fans still active today, has long been thought to have its active channel reaching the lower fan. Our findings reveal a middle-fan avulsion that shifted the terminal sediment sink 1,800 km landward, forming the modern terminal lobe complex. The lobes, dominated by sandy turbidites, are relatively thin (<20 m), but cover large areas (up to 1,350 km 2 ). Their evolution is strongly related to inherited topography and probably autogenic processes while external factors (e.g., monsoon and sea-level variation) control sediment supply and types of gravity flows. These lobes represent a small portion of the channel-levee-lobe system, as sediments mainly accumulated on the levees during Holocene highstand. Identifying the modern sink of the Bengal Fan provides a closure point for the Earth’s largest source-to-sink system, with implications for present-day fluxes of sediments, carbon, and marine litter across a vulnerable coastal region.
SN - 2662-4435
ER -