It is an old habit of mine to read scientific research papers in various serious journals such as Nature and on websites such as the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
I came across this fascinating paper titled ‘Paleocene latitude of the Kohistan–Ladakh arc indicates multistage India–Eurasia collision’. I know, I know, I probably lost you at Paleocene. It is a geologic epoch that lasted from about 66 to 56 million years ago.
That period is directly relevant to what we call India today and all the hyper-emotionalism of what we are and what our sovereign boundaries are and/or should be in places such Ladakh. I mention Ladakh particularly since it is in the news these days because of the continuing and most serious border tensions in over five decades with China.
When we take a short-term view, as in now, the past 100 years and the next 100 years—and we ought to—we feel a whole assortment of emotions. I tend not to do that because my view has naturally been in billions of years when it comes to the universe, a few billion years when it comes to our solar system and hundreds of millions of years to tens of millions of years when it comes to Earth.
That is where Paleocene—between 66 million and 56 million years ago—comes in. It was around that time when what we now call India began as a direct consequence of tectonic collision. In my biography of the Dalai Lama, ‘The Dénouement: The 14th Dalai Lama's life of persistence’ I have written about this very subject to talk about the geological birth of the Tibetan plateau.
A paper published on the PNAS website by Craig Martin of Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, and seven others, says the following. I am quoting from it even though many of you may not understand much of it. I understand a reasonable amount of it.
“We present paleomagnetic constraints on the latitude of an intraoceanic subduction system that is now sutured between India and Eurasia in the western Himalaya. Our results demonstrate that the India–Eurasia collision was a multistage process involving at least two subduction systems rather than a single-stage event. This resolves the discrepancy between the amount of convergence and the observed crustal shortening in the India–Eurasia collision system, as well as the 10–15 Ma time lag between collision onset in India and the initiation of collision-related deformation and metamorphism in Eurasia. The presence of an additional subduction system in the Neotethys ocean explains the rapid India–Eurasia convergence rates in the Cretaceous and global climate variations in the Cenozoic,” it says explaining the importance of their research.
In the abstract the authors say, “We report paleomagnetic data showing that an intraoceanic Trans-Tethyan subduction zone existed south of the Eurasian continent and north of the Indian subcontinent until at least Paleocene time. This system was active between 66 and 62 Ma at a paleolatitude of 8.1 ± 5.6 °N, placing it 600–2,300 km south of the contemporaneous Eurasian margin. The first ophiolite obductions onto the northern Indian margin also occurred at this time, demonstrating that collision was a multistage process involving at least two subduction systems. Collisional events began with collision of India and the Trans-Tethyan subduction zone in Late Cretaceous to Early Paleocene time, followed by the collision of India (plus Trans-Tethyan ophiolites) with Eurasia in mid-Eocene time. These data constrain the total postcollisional convergence across the India–Eurasia convergent zone to 1,350–2,150 km and limit the north–south extent of northwestern Greater India to <900 km. These results have broad implications for how collisional processes may affect plate reconfigurations, global climate, and biodiversity.”
Essentially, what they are saying that when the Paleocene epoch tectonic collision began there was a chain of volcanic islands. The drifting India landmass swept up rocks from these volcanic islands as it began crashing into the Eurasian plate which created the Himalaya and the whole geology and terrain that we now call the India-China border, including Ladakh.
I have traveled extensively in parts of Ladakh as well as the early Himalayas in Kashmir, Garhwal and Himachal Pradesh. A casual look at the materials that make up those splendid mountains reveal a strange oceanic feel in their rocks.
My larger point is that what we now call a region of great sovereign consequence and importance to what we now call India was some 40-50 million years ago just drifting tectonic plates. We get so focused on and obsessed with the minutiae of national boundaries and sovereign sensitivities forgetting the primordial nature of the processes that create landmasses we call sovereign nation-states and those who occupy them as citizens and so on. What flows from all that is the idea of distinct cultures and everything that results from it including languages and religions and all the fixed ideas that begin to form.
On every visit of mine to these regions in the 1990s the overwhelming sense for me was one of awe about the primordial forces that shaped Earth. Once you recognize that, you forget absurd ideas about nationalities and sovereignty and borders and disputes and wars and death and destruction. Ironically though, it was precisely a form of massive geological destruction and crunching and subducting that created what we now call countries. And within those country borders, rise the ideas about cultural, religious and linguistic identities that too move like tectonic plates and ram into each other creating conflict and violence.