Indian Tectonic Plate Moving Below Himalayas Could Be Splitting Tibet: Study

The Indian tectonic plate is shifting towards the Eurasian plate, resulting in a decrease of landmass at a rate of 2mm per year, according to a new study. The plate's movement is also causing Himalayas to grow and may also be tearing apart Tibet into two, it further said. The geophysicists, who were part of the research team, found that due to the movement, the surface of the plate is peeling off like the lid off a tin of fish. The process began about 60 million years ago as India ploughed into Eurasia, buckling the surface and forming the highest mountains on Earth.

The research was presented at the annual meeting of and American Geophysical Union and led by Ocean University of China geophysicist Lin Liu. It has been posted online on ESS Open Archive.

The discovery shows the world's highest mountain range may even be more complex than previously believed, the researchers said, as per a Live Science report.

The Himalayas, still young, are growing taller because of the collision with the Eurasian plates.

The rate of collision is faster in the oceans, than on land, as found in the study. In cases where oceanic and continental plates collide, the denser oceanic plate slides beneath the lighter continental plate in a process called subduction. This process may lead to more earthquakes in North India, Northeast India and Tibet, as suggested by the researchers.

The study is based on the analysis of earthquake waves travelling beneath Tibet and gases rising to the surface.

"We didn't know continents could behave this way and that is, for solid earth science, pretty fundamental," Douwe van Hinsbergen, a geodynamicist at Utrecht University, told the journal Science.

Fabio Capitanio, a geodynamicist at Monash University, has cautioned that plenty of uncertainties remain about the process, and the data is limited. "It's just a snapshot. But the work is an important step toward understanding how our modern landscape came to be. It's definitely the type of work that we need to move forward," he said.

An earlier study, published in 2022, also showed variations in the type of helium gas coming up to the surface from the geothermal springs in the region. By mapping the levels of helium over different springs, researchers found the boundary where the two plates currently meet just north of the Himalayas.

This new study can give geophysicists a better understanding of how tectonic plates interact and help in developing better earthquake prediction methods.