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Unfeasible subduction?

Nature Geoscience volume 10, pages 878–879 (2017)Cite this article

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To the Editor — Subduction of continental crust is generally thought to be inhibited by buoyancy, whereas cooled oceanic crust is denser than the mantle and is prone to subduction1. This explains why continental crust is up to billions of years old, whereas in-situ oceanic crust is not more than hundreds of millions of years old. Recently, Ingalls et al.2 posited that all crust consumed by convergence between India and Asia since about 56 million years ago was continental. They compared modern crustal volumes in the India–Asia collision zone with pre-collisional volumes inferred from their palaeogeographic reconstruction and argued that 50% of this continental crust — a region stretching northward for about 2,400 km, forming a Greater Indian continental promontory — has entirely subducted.

Geophysical modelling suggests that lower continental crust can subduct when the more buoyant upper crust is scraped off (accreted in orogens) and thus escapes subduction3. The Himalaya contains accreted continental upper crust that stretches from north to south for less than about 1,000 km when restored to its undeformed state4. Thus, according to Ingalls and colleagues’ reconstruction2, at least 1,400 km of Greater Indian continental crust,  covering an area similar to Arabia, subducted (mostly before 50 million years ago) at reconstructed subduction rates of up to 18 cm per year5. Such a scenario would be extraordinary.

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Fig. 1: Palaeolatitude versus time curve displaying the predicted palaeolatitudes and 95% confidence envelopes for a reference point at 29° N, 88° E using the same global apparent polar wander path as in ref

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Earth Sciences, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Douwe J. J. van Hinsbergen

  2. Department of Geology & Geophysics, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA

    Peter C. Lippert & Wentao Huang

  3. Department of Geosciences, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

    Wentao Huang

Authors
  1. Douwe J. J. van Hinsbergen
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  2. Peter C. Lippert
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  3. Wentao Huang
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Correspondence to Douwe J. J. van Hinsbergen.

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van Hinsbergen, D.J.J., Lippert, P.C. & Huang, W. Unfeasible subduction?. Nature Geosci 10, 878–879 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-017-0017-0

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