The Tibetan Plateau thickens
Continued Indian indentation raises and widens the highest plateau on Earth.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 7 million years
- Known to
- ± 4 million years
- Era
- Oligocene, Cenozoic
As India keeps pushing north the crust beneath Tibet thickens to around 70 kilometres, roughly double normal continental thickness, and the plateau expands outward and upward. Exactly when different parts reached their present elevation is one of the more contested questions in tectonics, with proxies from leaf physiognomy, oxygen isotopes and basin analysis giving conflicting answers. The plateau's growth is central to arguments about the Asian monsoon, Cenozoic cooling, and the drying of central Asia.