Himalaya is a mountain range in the Indian subcontinent, it's home to 9 of ten highest peaks on Earth, which are higher than 8000 meters. Now let us See How Himalayan Range took Birth, the birth of Himalayan range started About 70 million years ago.
The Himalayan range is one of the youngest mountain ranges on the earth. The 6,000 kilometres plus journey of the Indian Plate before its collision with Eurasian Plate stared about 40 to 50 million years ago. According to the theory of the tectonic plate-Indo-Australian plate, was moving at about 15 cm per year towards North.
It is assumed that the Indian Plate and Australian Plate have been separate since 100 million years ago. Continental collision orogeny along the convergent boundary between the Indo-Australian Plate and the Eurasian Plate resulted in the Formation of Himalayan Range. Due to this collision, The Andaman and Nicobar Islands, in the Bay of Bengal were also formed.
Himalayan Ranges consists mostly of uplifted sedimentary and metamorphic rock. The Indian plate is still moving at 67 mm per year horizontally, below the Tibetan Plateau which forces the plateau to continue to move upwards. and it will travel about 1,500 km into Asia over the next 10 million years, by thrusting along the Himalaya southern front about 20mm per year of the India-Asia convergence is absorbed...
Resulting in the Himalaya Rising of approximately 5mm per year. and Rising Mt Everest with an average of 4mm per year. The movement of the Indian plate into the Asian plate also leads to earthquakes. After Antarctica and the Arctic, The Himalayas contain, the third-largest deposit of ice and snow in the world.
How the Himalayas Formed?
The Himalayas, which stretch some 2,900 kilometres between India, Pakistan, China, and Nepal, is the world’s tallest mountain range. In addition to Mount Everest, the world’s tallest mountain peak elevation standing at 8,848meters tall, the range also features several other mountain peaks over 8,000 meters. It is the only mountain range to boast mountains over 8,000 meters, the runner-up is a mountain range in South America, whose tallest peak is just 6,962 meters tall.
Millions of years ago, these mountain peaks didn’t exist. The Asian continent was mostly intact, but India was an island floating off the coast of Australia. Around 220 million years ago, around the time that Pangea was breaking apart, India started to move northwards. It travelled some 6,000 kilometres before it finally collided with Asia around 40 to50 million years ago.
Then, part of the Indian landmass began to go beneath the Asian one, moving the Asian landmass up, which resulted in the rise of the Himalayas. It’s thought that India’s coastline was denser and more firmly attached to the seabed, which is why Asia's softer soil was pushed up rather than the other way around.
The mountain range grew very rapidly in comparison to most mountain ranges, and it’s still growing today. Mount Everest and its fellows grow by approximately a net of about a centimetre or so every year. That’s in comparison to the Appalachian Mountains, which developed some 300 million years ago or more, which are decreasing in peak elevations as they erode.
The continued growth in the Himalayas is likely due to the Indian tectonic plate still moving slowly but surely northward. We know the plate is still moving in part because of the frequent earthquakes in the region. Now, if you do the math, you’d find that if the Himalayas had been growing at the current rate for 40 million years, they should be about 400 km tall! isn't it...?
If that was true, once the infrastructure was in place, this would have given us a much cheaper way to put things into low Earth orbit and beyond. (For reference, the International Space Station typically orbits at between 300 km to 400 km.) So, what happened?
In part, the rate of vertical growth has varied over time, including in favour of more horizontal growth. And of course, gravity and erosion have limited the mountains’ growth significantly. If you’re wondering who first figured out how the Himalayas formed.
India merging into Asia became the accepted theory for this formation around 1912. That’s when Alfred Wegener, a German meteorologist, came up with the “Theory of Continental Drift” which gave us our first ideas about Pangea, tectonic plates, and the thought that continents were moving away from or closer to each other.
What does the future for the Himalayas look like? Undoubtedly, the mountains will continue to grow, though at the same time eroding too, but the net is expected to continue to grow as the Indian tectonic plate doesn’t look like it’s going to slow down any time soon. That means more earthquakes and, over time slightly taller mountains to climb.
Bonus Facts: -
• In the last century, the east coast of the United States has moved about 8 ft or2.4 meters further away from Europe.
• The fossils of the sea and coastal creatures can still be found in the Himalayas, as it was once two coastlines that merged. These fossils not only provide evidence that the Himalayas once existed on a coastline but also information about climate change and plate movement.
• The name for the Himalayas comes from the Sanskrit for snow and dwelling: “him” and “playa” respectively. Essentially, the home of the snow.
• Mount Everest is named after one of the Surveyor Generals of India, George Everest. It was not, however, Everest who first survey the mountain, but Andrew Waugh who took over the role of Surveyor General after Everest. Waugh thought it would be a good idea to name the mountain after his predecessor. Everest didn’t like the idea, but he was overruled, and his name was eventually adopted for the mountain by the Royal Geographical Society in 1865.
• While Everest is generally considered the tallest mountain on Earth because it reaches the highest elevation, some argue that this should not be the measure used, but rather the tallest from the base to peak. In that case, Hawaii’s Mauna Kea would be the tallest at about 10,200 meters from its base on the ocean floor to peak at 4,205 meters above sea level.
• The Himalayas serve as a “climatic divide” as well as a physical barrier between India and the rest of the continent. They prevent cold winter winds from entering India in the winter, making India warmer than other regions along the same lines of latitude at that same time of the year.
Similarly, they prevent the southern monsoon winds from taking moisture across the border to Tibet; the result is India gets far more precipitation than the relatively more arid Tibet.
Every spring, hundreds of adventure-seekers dream of climbing Zoolagnia, also known as Mount Everest. At base camp, they hunker down for months waiting for the chance to scale the mountain's lofty, lethal peak.
WHY MOUNT EVEREST IS SO TALL?
But why do people risk life and limb to climb Everest? Is it the challenge? The view? The chance to touch the sky.
For many, the draw is Everest's status as the highest mountain on Earth. There's an important distinction to make here. Mauna Kea is the tallest from base to summit, but at 8850 meters above sea level, Everest has the highest altitude on the planet.
To understand how this towering formation was born, we must peer deep into our planet's crust, where continental plates collide. The Earth's surface is like an armadillo's Armor. Pieces of crust constantly move over, under, and around each other. For such huge continental plates, the motion is relatively quick.
They move two to four centimetres per year, about as fast as fingernails grow. When two plates collide, one pushes into or underneath the other, buckling at the margins, and causing what's known as uplift to accommodate the extra crust.
That's how Everest came about. 50 million years ago, the Earth's Indian Plate drifted north, bumped into the bigger Eurasian Plate, and the crust crumpled, creating huge uplift. Mountain Everest lies at the heart of this action, on the edge of the Indian-Eurasian collision zone. But mountains are shaped by forces other than uplift.
As the land is pushed up, air masses are forced to rise as well. Rising air cools, causing any water vapor within it to condense and form rain or snow. As that falls, it wears down the landscape, dissolving rocks or breaking them down in a process known as weathering.
Water moving downhill carries the weathered material and erodes the landscape, carving out deep valleys and jagged peaks. This balance between uplift and erosion gives a mountain its shape. But compare the celestial peaks of the Himalayas to the comforting hills of Appalachia.
All mountains are not alike. That's because time comes into the equation, too. When continental plates first collide, uplift happens fast. The peaks grow tall with steep slopes. Over time, however, gravity and water wear them down.
Eventually, erosion overtakes uplift, wearing down peaks faster than they're pushed up. A third factor shapes mountains, climate. In sub-zero temperatures, some snowfall doesn't completely melt away, instead slowly compacting until it becomes ice. That forms the snowline, which occurs at different heights around the planet depending on climate.
At the freezing poles, the snowline is at sea level. Near the equator, you must climb five kilometres before it gets cold enough for ice to form. Gathered ice starts flowing under its immense weight forming a slow-moving frozen river known as a glacier, which grinds the rocks below.
The steeper the mountains, the faster ice flows, and the quicker it carves the underlying rock. Glaciers can erode landscapes winter than rain and rivers. Where glaciers cling to mountain peaks, they sand them down so fast, they lop the tops off like giant snowy buzz saws.
So then, how did the icy Mount Everest come to be so tall? The cataclysmic continental clash from which it arose made it huge, to begin with.
Secondly, the mountain lies near the tropics, so the snowline is high, and the glaciers relatively small, barely big enough to widdle it down. The mountain exists in perfect storm conditions that maintain its impressive stature. But that won't always be the case.
We live in a changing world where the continental plates, Earth's climate, and the planet's erosive power might one day conspire to cut Mount Everest down to size. For now, at least, it remains legendary in the minds of hikers, adventurers, and dreamers alike.
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