In Brief
Micro Plate Under Tibet
In Central Tibet, a separate Tibetan plate exists with a thickness of about 100 kilometres. This plate is moved from south to north-east over the Eurasian plate and pushes it down up to 250 kilometres deep into the mantle. This new view on plate tectonics was presented by team of scientists from the Helmholtz Centre Potsdam, GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences in cooperation with Chinese, American and British scientists. The Indian tectonic plate is currently moving at a speed of about five centimetres per year to the northeast. "In its collision with Eurasia it pushes the Himalayas and the Tibetan plateau up like a bulldozer, bores itself 500 kilometres under Tibet and is clearly detectable up to a depth of about 250 kilometres. We had already shown that in our previous studies", explains Prof. Dr Rainer Kind from the GFZ. "But until now there was not enough data to see how the tectonic plates behave in the collision on the northern edge of Tibet."
The team of geoscientists therefore mapped the boundary layers of different materials within the Earth in northern Tibet using seismic waves from distant earthquakes, practically scanning the subsurface of Tibet from below. As a result, the newly discovered Tibetan plate appears as a much more defined, independent area in this part of the lithosphere between India and Eurasia.
