India: Fastest Continent Because Of Thinnest Lithosphere

India's lithosphere is only half as thick as others which are the reason for its....

  India's lithosphere is only half as thick as others which are the reason for its high speed collision with Eurasia. Fifty million years ago the Indian sub-continent collided with the enormous Eurasian continent with a velocity of about 20 cm/year. With such a high velocity India was the fastest of the former parts of Gondwanaland, according to a report by a team of scientists from the Geo Frostings Zen rum Potsdam (GFZ, Germany's National Lab for Geosciences) and the National Geophysical Research Institute, India, in the 18th October 2007 edition of Nature. Due to this collision at such high velocities the largest mountain belt on Earth, the Himalayas, was formed, as was the massive Tibetan plateau. Until 140 million years ago India was part of the super continent Gondwanaland. When Gondwanaland broke up, its various parts drifted apart with different velocities. Today these various parts constitute India, Africa, Australia, Antarctica and South America. However, the question which still remained to be answered was why India was quicker and moved much further than the other parts of Gondwanaland. A new seismological method for determining the thickness of the present-day lithosphere plates with more precision than before has been developed at GFZ Potsdam. With this method the team of researchers has found that the Indian plate is only about 100 km thick, whereas the other parts of Gondwanaland are about 200 km thick and thus about twice as thick as India.