GEOLOGISTS DISCOVER UNEXPECTED EVIDENCE ABOUT TIBETAN PLATEAU

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GEOLOGISTS DISCOVER UNEXPECTED EVIDENCE ABOUT TIBETAN PLATEAU
16 July 2007 - University of Chicago

Geologists have learned that the height of the Tibetan Plateau, a vast, elevated region of central Asia sometimes called “the roof of the world,” has remained remarkably constant for at least 35 million years.

Before their last expedition to Tibet, the geologists expected to find evidence that the plateau had been rising 35 million years ago, the result of large-scale geologic forces grinding India and Asia against one another. They found instead that the plateau has stood at its current high elevation for at least 35 million years.

The best explanation for Rowley and Currie’s finding: the plateau has widened progressively northward as the Earth’s crust thickened. “This explanation is at odds with a popular theory that has survived since the 1980s,” said geological oceanographer Chris Beaumont of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.

India and Asia began colliding 50 million years ago as a result of plate tectonics, a large-scale geologic force that slowly moves the continents around the Earth’s surface. The collision took place in an area that once may have resembled the tropical Indonesian island of Sumatra, and it produced the Tibetan Plateau. Today, the plateau stretches for 190,000 square miles at an elevation of approximately 16,000 feet.

Some parts of the plateau resemble the terrain of Kansas, said Rowley, Professor and Chairman of Geophysical Sciences. “You could convince yourself that you’re in Kansas, except that you’re breathing a little too hard.”

According to a popular theory, both the Earth’s crust, the planet’s outermost solid layer, and the upper portion of the mantle layer that lies below the crust thicken as the continents collide. Then the crust containing the plateau would have “bobbed up,” Beaumont explained, while the mantle fell away and sank deep into the Earth.

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During the late 1950s and early 1960s, the University began to add modern buildings to the formerly all-Gothic campus.

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