How did India crash into Asia and altered the world??

What does the Indian tectonic plate need to do with the Himalayan, climate change, and whales?

This article explores how tectonics put.

The Indian subcontinent on a worldwide stage

The Himalayas are massive, and therefore the Himalayas are beautiful. And it had been tectonics that caused the Indian plate to crash into the Eurasian plate 50 million years ago.

 

 

The violent collision created the highest mountains within the world, spreading over 1500 miles.

The Himalayas are so beautiful that many of its peaks are considered holy in both Buddhism and Hinduism. Once we say "plate tectonics," we mean the geological theory that the surface is formed of the many insanely Massive plates which hold continents on top.

 

 

Of these continents move, and you would possibly think, but the continents are HUGE, how can they move?

Deep inside the world, it's hot, like boiling.

And when that energy builds up, it creates currents of molten Earth, making its outer shell these continents move. This tectonic process began probably about 3.5 billion years ago after the world cooled down. Our resident Earth Sciences professor Dr. Nigel Hughes spent his life studying the Indian subcontinent and broke down the tectonic process.

Rewind 550 million years, when the supercontinent Gondwanaland was formed. At the time, India was a part of this supercontinent, as were Africa, Australia, Antarctica, and South America.270 m years later, Gondwanaland collided with the Euro American continent to make a sound more enormous continent called Pangea.

 

 

Gondwanaland later disintegrated, which made India broke off and started to maneuver Northwards India mode. It omitted hot spots within the Earth's interior, which made India picked up tons of speed. Imagine continental plates like icebergs, and most of them are not visible.

An enormous part of India's "iceberg" is getting separated from rock bottom. India got lighter and will devour even more SPEED. And devour speed it did crossing 9 THOUSAND kilometers in 70 million years from the South Pole to its position within the north today.

 

 

To put this into perspective, plates usually move about 5 centimeters a year.

India almost moved TWENTY centimeters a year. And it's this unbelievable geological speed that explains the dimensions of the Himalayas—the faster and more complex the collision, the more significant the impact.

 

 

In the beginning, we said that geologists likened the Indian subcontinent to a VIKING FUNERAL SHIP. What did we mean?

In the days of the Vikings, if a high-ranking warrior died, their bodies were sent across the ocean on a funeral ship with their most precious belongings.

And you see India with its treasure trove of ancient fossils from Gondwanaland traveled kind of a VIKING FUNERAL SHIP across the ocean. On the Indian subcontinent, early geologists found extinct fossils like Glossopterris.

 

 

An extinct fern plant seemed like a tongue, the weird-looking Lystrosaurus, an extinct herbivorous animal, or the hard-shelled trilobites, an extinct marine arthropod species.

These Fossils were also found in Africa, Antarctica, AND South America, which indicated a historical connection between these places.

These fossils were used as evidence for Gondwanaland's existence and to prove the idea of tectonics.

 

 

But India didn't ONLY transport dead stuff. It also carried living stuff! As India floated for many years, countless species roamed on its surface and evolved in various climates.

 

 

This created Wales.,

One of the good evolutions happened while India was getting closer to Asia. Tiny deer-like animals that lived on their lands probably evolved to become the ancestors of recent whales.

And when the two plates finally collided, the plants and animals living in India could spread and interact with species living in Asia.

Consistent with Dr. Hughes, this kind of mingling and the changing physical environment offered an ideal boiling pot for biological innovation-evolution.

 

 

India's collision didn't just affect the bottom and animals, though. It also changed the local and global climate. Poetry about the good Asian monsoon cycles goes back thousands of years, with some the earliest being Kalidasa's Sanskrit poem "The cloud messenger."

The Himalayas and Tibetan plateau kick-started this unique cycle of rain. The Tibetan area is so high that it sucks in humid air from the Indian Ocean together extensive. When clouds build up there and obtain blocked by the mountain, seasonal rains fall heavily across the entire subcontinent.

 

 

The Himalayan water system supports one-fifth of the world's population, and mighty rivers like the Indus, Ganges, Yangtze, or Brahmaputra were created within the Himalayas. All this water makes the Himalayas erode...and this eroded material possesses to travel somewhere; over the last 26 million years, the deposited sediment has gotten 20 kilometers thick.

 

 

And that built the entire Bengal delta.

But there's another vast thing the Indian plate did, even as it so warm, there have been no ice caps within the North or South poles. But after the collision, silicates within the Himalayan mountains began to absorb massive amounts of CO2 fast from the atmosphere. That all meant one thing, GLOBAL COOLING.

And because the Himalayas rose further, the entire Earth's temperature fell, then began the last glacial period.

Today, India's story remains unfolding.

 

 

The Indian plate remains moving and still slowly PLOWING into the Eurasian plate, suggesting the Himalayas are still growing. This constant friction is also causing big earthquakes in Nepal and surrounding countries.

We're still deciding how the collision changed our planet forever, but what we do know is that this event was and continues to be one of the critical events in our planet's 4.5 billion History.