An ancient geologic smashup raised the mighty Himalaya mountains—and the collision continues today.
may not know it, but under the snowpack sits an expanse of mottled gray rocks that once lay on the ocean floor.make up our planet’s fractured outer shell. These plates continually jockey for position, shaping the array of features visible at the surface. In some places, the plates pull apart, creating valleys in the land. In others, they collide, shoving mountains into the sky.
At the time, the vast Tethys ocean filled the gap between India and Eurasia, but as India moved northward, the. The plate under the water, made of dense oceanic crust, plunged beneath the southern edge of the more buoyant rocks that make up the Eurasian continental plate, creating a feature known as a subduction zone.
allows researchers to chart a continent’s position over time, and recent work using this method revealed that when the mountain-forming collision supposedly took place, some 55 million years ago, India would have been strikingly far south from Eurasia. That would leave a mysterious yawning gap between the two continents.
United States Latest News, United States Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Why Mount Everest Is the World’s Tallest MountainA model suggests a massive uplift caused by a phenomenon called “river piracy” partly explains Everest’s impressive height
Read more »
Mount Everest, the world's tallest mountain, is still growing — here’s whyMount Everest is growing taller every year, and new research suggests that the merger of two rivers thousands of years ago plays a key role in its rise.
Read more »
Laughter and Humor 101Why we laugh, why we don’t, and why it matters
Read more »
Mount Everest is taller than it should be — and a weird river may be to blameHannah Osborne is the planet Earth and animals editor at Live Science. Prior to Live Science, she worked for several years at Newsweek as the science editor. Before this she was science editor at International Business Times U.K. Hannah holds a master's in journalism from Goldsmith's, University of London.
Read more »
Mount Everest is still growing tallerLaura is a science news writer, covering a wide variety of subjects, but she is particularly fascinated by all things aquatic, paleontology, nanotechnology, and exploring how science influences daily life. Laura is a proud former resident of the New Jersey shore, a competitive swimmer, and a fierce defender of the Oxford comma.
Read more »
A river is pushing up Mount Everest's peakMount Everest is about 15 to 50 meters taller than it would otherwise be because of uplift caused by a nearby eroding river gorge, and continues to grow because of it.
Read more »