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Concept
Indian Plate
Summary
The Indian Plate (or India Plate) is a minor tectonic plate straddling the equator in the Eastern Hemisphere. Originally a part of the ancient continent of Gondwana, the Indian Plate broke away from the other fragments of Gondwana , began moving north and carried Insular India with it. It was once fused with the adjacent Australian Plate to form a single Indo-Australian Plate, and recent studies suggest that India and Australia have been separate plates for at least 3 million years and likely longer. The Indian Plate includes most of modern South Asia (the Indian subcontinent) and a portion of the basin under the Indian Ocean, including parts of South China and western Indonesia, and extending up to but not including Ladakh, Kohistan and Balochistan.
Until roughly , the Indian Plate formed part of the supercontinent Gondwana together with modern Africa, Australia, Antarctica, and South America. Gondwana broke up as these continents drifted apart at different velocities, a process which led to the opening of the Indian Ocean.
In the late Cretaceous, approximately and subsequent to the splitting off from Gondwana of conjoined Madagascar and India, the Indian Plate split from Madagascar, forming Insular India. It began moving north, at about per year, and is believed to have begun colliding with Asia as early as , in the Eocene epoch of the Cenozoic. However, some authors suggest the collision between India and Eurasia occurred much later, around . If the collision occurred between 55 and 50 Mya, the Indian Plate would have covered a distance of , moving more quickly than any other known plate. In 2012, paleomagnetic data from the Greater Himalaya was used to propose two collisions to reconcile the discrepancy between the amount of crustal shortening in the Himalaya (~) and the amount of convergence between India and Asia (~). These authors propose a continental fragment of northern Gondwana rifted from India, traveled northward, and initiated the "soft collision" between the Greater Himalaya and Asia at ~50 Mya.
Official source
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