Despite more than 150 years of research on the topic, the evolution of the Himalayan orogen remains an enigma. YetTibet may hold the key to unravelling what gives the Earth its tectonic pulse. The hidden shreds of evidence narrating Tibet's geological history span deep ocean basins, continental margins, rivers, rugged plateaux, the world's biggest mountain chain and massive sinking and rising blobs of mantle material at great depths in the Earth. Reading these clues requires gathering data in vastly different settings, but a geodynamic simulation is required to understand fully the processes that created Tibet and that continue to ram India into lo Eurasia, albeit at reduced speed. Writing in Nature Geoscience, Fabio Capitanio and colleagues step into this hotly contested ena - a source of collisions of many sorts, including those between geologists, geophysicists and geodynamicists - and explore the evolving tectonic force balance during continent-continent collision using a numerical model'.
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