'The uplift of the Tibetan Plateau' is invoked to explain various phenomena, from monsoon dynamics to biodiversity evolution and everything in between. It's not accurate, finds a new paper.
The orogeny of the Tibetan region (Tibet, The Himalaya and the Hengduan Mountains) dates back approximately 200 million years, long before the arrival of India, and was the product of earlier Gondwanan tectonic block collisions that produced a complex of mountain chains and valleys. The review finds that the concept of an extensive low-relief Tibet, rising in its entirety as a result of the India-Eurasia collision, is false, and the product of overly simplistic modeling.
Previous stable isotope and fossil-based estimates of past surface heights were often contradictory; isotopes tend to record the height of mountain crests, while the fossils are more indicative of where sediments accumulate in valley bottoms. The isotopic bias towards uplands means that even valleys appear as uplands at the height of the bounding mountains and so appear as an elevated plateau, a result confirmed by isotope-enabled climate modelling. By combining well-dated multiple paleoaltimetric methods a better understanding of past topography emerges.
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