How the Tibetan plateau rises because of the far Pacific Ocean

Science : Explaining how an area the size of Alaska got to be higher on average than the highest peak in the contiguous United States doesn’t seem all that difficult: Just blame India. The roving subcontinent plowed into Eurasia beginning 50 million years ago and hasn’t stopped yet. When it comes to working out the details, however, the Tibetan question remains the most contentious in tectonics.

The problem is that researchers can’t see much of what’s going on beneath the plateau. Is the underlying rock strong and rigid or flowing like molasses? In the 22 August issue of Science , geoscientists Leigh Royden, B. Clark Burchfiel, and Robert van der Hilst of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge argue that rock has flowed west to east beneath the plateau to inflate its eastern side and that the flow has been throttled by tectonic doings as far as thousands of kilometers away.