Keith Priestley

Lecture 24  India, the Himalaya

Physics of the Earth as a Planet

and Tibet

India, the Himalaya and Tibet

Uplift and support of Tibet

The Himalaya Mountains and the Tibetan Plateau are the most spectacular present-day tectonic
features on the continents. Tibet has formed by the successive collision of several continental blocks
with southern Asia, the last of which was India.

The collision of India with southern Asia began

50 Ma and has resulted in crustal thickening and uplift of southern Tibet and the Himalaya Mountain
range. Estimates of plate reconstructions based on seaoor magnetic anomalies and from paleomagnetic
studies in the Himalaya and Tibet suggest that as much as 2500 km of the Indian continent may have
disappeared beneath southern Asia since the collision began.
Various models have been proposed for the thickened crust and high elevation of the Himalaya and
Tibet.

The two end-member models are the (i) sub-horizontal underthrusting of the Indian plate

beneath southern Asia and (ii) a uniform thickening of the lithosphere beneath Tibet followed by the
upper mantle portion of the lithosphere becoming gravitationally unstable and delaminating.

Models proposed for the uplift of the Himalaya and Tibet. Argand (1924) proposed that Tibet
had been uplifted from India underthrusting intact beneath southern Asia. England & Houseman (1988)
proposed that the uplift resulted from a uniform thickening of the whole lithosphere. Molnar (1988) suggested
an initial uniform thickening of the whole lithosphere but that the mantle portion of the lithosphere had become
gravitationally unstable because it was colder than the surrounding mantle, causing it to delaminate and sink
into the deeper mantle.
Figure 111:

The proposed models for the uplift and support of Tibet have very dierent wavespeed structure in the
upper mantle; the rst a high wavespeed upper mantle and the second a low wavespeed upper mantle.
This dierence could be assessed by seismology and gravity.

Figure 112: Free-air gravity eld g calculated from GOCO2S, using a low pass lter with a cuto at 500 km
tapered so as the spherical harmonic coecients with degrees 2 l 7 set to zero and those between 8 and 11
multiplied by factors of (l 7)/5. The paired gravity anomalies surrounding Tibet are the exural signal. For
the high parts of the Plateau there is very little free-air gravity signal.

Figure 113: Body wave travel time tomography model for the Tibetan mantle (Li et al., 2006). At the right are
the main tectonic elements in SE Asia. The dashed red lines are plate boundaries. The thick purple lines denote
main tectonic structures, where SoB-Songliao Basin, OB-Ordos Basin, SB-Sichuan Basin, KB-Khorat Basin,
STB-Shan Thai Block, YB-Youjiang Block, JGB-Junggar Basin, SGF-Songpan Ganzi Foldbelt, QB-Qiangtang
Block, LB-Lhasa Block, HB-Himalayan Block, KF-Kunlun Fault. Black arrows show the continental collision
in the west and slab roll back in the east which causes a clockwise rotation of SE Asia. The blue thick line
shows the horizontal limit of the Indian lithospheric mantle beneath the Tibetan plateau. The positions of the
four cross-sections are shown by black lines with gray dots. At the left are vertical cross-sections through some
of the main features of the velocity model down to 1700 km depth. The wavespeed scale is shown beneath the
tomography plots.

Figure 114: Shear wavespeed model for eastern Asia derived from surface wave tomography model. The model

was derived from the inversion of the fundamental and rst four higher mode Rayleigh waves for 500,000
seismic waveforms providing 10 106 constraints on the shear wave structure of the region. The map at
left shows the variation in wavespeed at a depth of 125 km. Black dots denote locations of magnitude 4,5 and
greater earthquakes. The wavespeed perturbation scale is shown at the lower left of the map and the reference
wavespeed 125 km depth is indicated at right below the map. The lines labeled AA'CC' on the map indicate
the locations of the three proles shown to the right of the map. Prole AA' crosses northern India and Tibet.
The topography is shown in the upper part of the cross-section, earthquakes located 75 km either side of the
prole are shown as black dots. The model between 0-75 km is not plotted.

33 Km

Ps

p
sPm
p,P
mp
PpP s,PpSm PsSmp
s,
m
PpP ,PpSm
ms
PsP s
m
PsS

tP

ec
Dir
Ps

Direct P
Radial receiver
function

Surface

35 Km

S wave
P wave

Vp=6.0
Vs=3.46

PpPms

Vp=8.1
Vs=4.67

PsSms

Moho

Time (sec)

PpSms
PsPms

Figure 115: Crustal receiver functions consist of converted body waves and their reverberations in the crust

beneath a seismograph resulting from a teleseismic P-wave incident on the base of the crust. The ray paths of
the various arrivals for a layer over half-space crustal model are shown at upper left (red lines for P-waves, green
lines for S-waves). Below the ray diagram is a synthetic example of the receiver function for the simple crustal
model. Ps denotes the P-to-S conversion at the crust-mantle boundary, PpPm s denotes the reverberation with
two P-wave legs and one S-wave leg, PpSm s + PsPm s denotes the reverberation with two P-wave legs and two
S-wave legs, etc. At right is a stack (black line) and one standard deviation for an observed receiver function.

South

MFTMBT
Indian Foreland Basin

Elv (km)

C1

MCT
Himalayas

STD

KKF

IZS

North

C2

5
0

3
3.2
3.4

3.4

20
Depth (km)

BNS

Lhasa Terrane

TH

3.4
3.6
3.8
4
4.2
4.4

40
60
80
100
0

50

100

150

200

250

300

350

400

450

500

550

600

650

700

750

Distance along section (km)

km/s
2.0

2.2

2.4

2.6

2.8

3.0

3.2

3.4

3.6

3.8

4.0

4.2

4.4

4.6

4.8

5.0

Figure 116: Variation in crustal structure across the Himalaya Mountains. The two gures at the top show
results for the eastern Himalaya with the receiver function at left and the crust-mantle interface shown at right.
Green dots show crustal earthquakes 150 km either side of the prole and red dots show locations of deep
earthquakes in eastern Tibet very near the crust-mantle boundary. A dense receiver function across the central
Himalaya is shown in the middle of the gure. The variation in the crustal structure across the western Himalaya
is shown at the bottom of the gure. The white dots denote the depth of the crust-mantle boundary determined
from receiver functions; the background colour shows the variation on the shear wave velocity determined from
short period Rayleigh wave dispersion. The shear wavespeed scale is shown at lower right.

surface
Moho

crust
upper mantle

Figure 117:

Propagation paths for the

Sn

headwave is shown in the upper part of the gure.

Sn

is composed

of a whispering gallery-like phase propagating just below the crust-mantle boundary when there is a positive
wavespeed gradient with depth.

Sn propagation

is blocked where the high velocity lid, often equated with the

Sn as a function of
Sn was blocked for paths across northern Tibet

lithosphere, is disrupted. The lower part of the gure displays the propagation eciency of
frequency across Tibet. Early studies showed that high frequency

and was given as evidence that the lithosphere beneath northern Tibet had become gravitationally unstable
and delaminated. The observations shown here from a much larger digital data set verify that high frequency

Sn

is blocked for paths across northern Tibet but low frequency

suggests that the feature blocking high frequency

Sn

Sn

propagates across the whole Plateau. This

is a thin structure in the uppermost mantle.

se
is
ra
og
m
s
ph

earthquake

76

80

40

84

88

92

96

100
40

36

36

32

32

28

28

76

80

84

88

92

96

100

AA XC (1991), XR (1994), X4 (20072009)

BB XR (19981999)
CC XF (20022005)

Figure 118: Regional variations in arrival times across a restricted region for distant earthquakes indicate
lateral variations in the wavespeed structure across the region. This is shown schematically in the upper part
of the gure. The map at middle left shows the location of three teleseismic S-wave delay proles across the
Tibetan Plateau. For the three proles the topography is shown at the top of the section and the delay time
indicated by the blue triangles with error bars is shown below the topography. Northern Tibet shows a delayed
S-wave arrival with respect to southern Tibet but the delay is small in magnitude and not large enough to be
the result of the lithosphere having been replaced by asthenosphere.

Thermal evolution
thekm,
lithosphere
tu=25 km,of
tl=15.
te=40. he=hu=2.e6
(b)

0.
1400

Temperature ( oC)

crustal thickening
by thrusting (2x)

(a)

Depth, km
Depth (km)

40.
80.

120.
160.

crust

200.
240.
0.

20.

40.

60.

80.

100.

120.

1150

900

650

400

150

140.

Age, Age
Ma (Ma)

lithospheric
mantle
0

(c)

50

10.

Depth, (km)
km
Depth

0.

20.

40.
60.

100

150.

90.

150
200
250
0

200

400

600

800

1000

1200

1400

Temperature, deg C o
Temperature
( C)

Figure 119: The thin low wavespeed layer beneath northern Tibet may have formed as a result of radioactive
heating in the thickened Tibetan crust. In the model shown the crust is doubled in thickness at zero time
and then warmed by radioactive decay in the crust. Rocks have a low thermal conductivity and the thickened
crust will result in a blanketing eect, causing the mid-crust to heat, forming a temperature inversion with the
mid-crustal temperature higher than the temperature in the shallow crust or uppermost mantle. As a result of
the temperature inversion, the uppermost mantle will warm from above, causing a decrease in the uppermost
mantle shear wavespeed. The time progression of the heating with depth is shown in the two gures at the
right.