What was there before himalayas

Ding Lin. Reprints and Permissions. Qiu, J. Tibet mountainous long before Himalayas. Nature Download citation. Published : 12 May Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:. Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article. Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative. Advanced search. Skip to main content Thank you for visiting nature.

Download PDF. The Transhimalaya Mountains near Lhasa, in the Tibet Autonomous Region of China, may have stood as tall as they do now long before the Himalayas themselves existed. Learn why it's so difficult to measure Everest. The growth can happen in fits and starts, brought on by more violent shifts in the landscape.

When the land compresses, pressure builds until it hits a breaking point. The blocks of earth can then suddenly shift, rattling the ground in the jolt of an earthquake. Depending on exactly how and where the ground shifts, temblors can cause the mountain to either grow or shrink small amounts. This may have been the case during the Nepal earthquake, according to satellite data.

At the same time, as the rocks continue to rise toward the skies, erosion works against their upward progression. In the Himalaya, much of the sediment flushes through the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers.

Even as erosion and gravity keep the mighty mountains in check, tectonic plates maintain their geologic dance, and Everest will continue to follow their lead.

All rights reserved. Science Explainer. Why Mount Everest keeps changing its height An ancient geologic smashup raised the mighty Himalaya mountains—and the collision continues today. The first rays of morning sunshine cast a glow over the peak of Mount Everest. Share Tweet Email. Why it's so hard to treat pain in infants. This wild African cat has adapted to life in a big city. Animals Wild Cities This wild African cat has adapted to life in a big city Caracals have learned to hunt around the urban edges of Cape Town, though the predator faces many threats, such as getting hit by cars.

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Why is the seafloor so recent and the continental crust so old? Where do we find the oldest continental rocks and the oldest seafloor? What are the different types of rocks? What is a fossil and what are they used for? What are hydrothermal vents, and why do we find them along mid-ocean ridges?

Seismology What is a seismic wave? What is the difference between body waves and surface waves, and between P-waves and S-waves? Why can't S-waves travel through liquids? How far can seismic waves reach? Why do P-waves travel faster than S-waves? Why is the interior of the Earth hot? What is the magnetic field of the Earth? Geologists generally thought that the Himalayas formed 55 million years ago in a single continental collision — when the Neotethys Ocean plate subducted under the southern edge of Eurasia and the Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates collided.

The magnetic field always points toward the magnetic north or the south, which is why your compass works, and averaged over thousands of years it points toward the geographic pole.

But it also slopes downward into the ground at an angle which varies depending on how far you are from the equator. When lava erupts and cools to form rock, the magnetic minerals inside lock in the direction of the magnetic field of that location. So by measuring the magnetization of volcanic rocks , scientists like me can determine what latitude they came from. Essentially, this method allows us to unwind millions of years of plate tectonic motions and create maps of the world at different times throughout geologic history.

Over multiple expeditions to the Ladakh Himalayas, our team collected hundreds of 1-inch diameter rock core samples. These rocks originally formed on a volcano active between 66 and 61 million years ago, around the time that the first stages of collision began. We used a hand-held electric drill with a specially designed diamond coring bit to drill approximately 10 centimeters down into the bedrock.

We then carefully marked these cylindrical cores with their original orientation before chiseling them out of the rock with nonmagnetic tools. The aim was to reconstruct where these rocks originally formed, before they were sandwiched between India and Eurasia and uplifted into the high Himalayas.

Keeping track of the orientation of the samples as well as the rock layers they came from is essential to calculating which way the ancient magnetic field pointed relative to the surface of the ground as it was over 60 million years ago.

Different mineral populations acquire their magnetization at different temperatures.