Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
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
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.
Ontological neighbourhood
Related courses (12)
ME-411: Mechanics of slender structures
Analysis of the mechanical response and deformation of slender structural elements.
PHYS-201(a): General physics : electromagnetism
Le cours traite des concepts de l'électromagnétisme et des ondes électromagnétiques.
ME-341: Heat and mass transfer
This course covers fundamentals of heat transfer and applications to practical problems. Emphasis will be on developing a physical and analytical understanding of conductive, convective, and radiative
Related concepts (16)
Indian subcontinent
The Indian subcontinent is a physiographical region in Southern Asia, situated on the Indian Plate, projecting southwards into the Indian Ocean from the Himalayas. Geopolitically, it spans major landmasses from the countries of Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Although the terms "Indian subcontinent" and "South Asia" are often used interchangeably to denote the region, the geopolitical term of South Asia frequently includes Afghanistan, which is not considered part of the subcontinent.
South Asia
South Asia is the southern subregion of Asia, which is defined in both geographical and ethnic-cultural terms. As commonly conceptualised, South Asia consists of the countries predominantly Afghanistan Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, Topographically, it is dominated by the Indian subcontinent and defined largely by the Indian Ocean in the south, and the Himalayas, Karakoram, and Pamir mountains in the north. The Amu Darya, which rises north of the Hindu Kush, forms a part of the northwestern border.
Gondwana
Gondwana (pronɡɒndˈwɑːnə) was a large landmass, sometimes referred to as a supercontinent. It was formed by the accretion of several cratons (a large stable block of the earth's crust), beginning with the East African Orogeny, the collision of India and Madagascar with East Africa, and was completed with the overlapping Brasiliano and Kuunga orogenies, the collision of South America with Africa, and the addition of Australia and Antarctica, respectively.