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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.

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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

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  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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