By Amy Maxmen
The Tibetan Plateau, a land mass nearly the size of the lower half of the United States, was thrust skyward when the Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates collided about 50 million years ago. But existing models of the order of events following the impact may be wrong, according to a recent report.
By claiming that the more northern regions of the plateau formed early in the aftermath, the report contradicts current views, which suggest that crustal contortions and uplift began where continents collided at the southern border of the Eurasian plate and gradually rippled northward.