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Topography and tectonics of western Tibet
InSAR data shows that the Karakoram and Altyn Tagh
faults are moving much more slowly than predicted by conventional plate tectonics modelling.
India is moving northwards, colliding with Asia at a rate of around five centimetres a year. There are two major faults within Western Tibet: the Altyn Tagh and the Karakoram.
Following the rules of plate tectonics, models of the collision of India and Asia predict that these two faults are slipping rapidly – at two to three centimetres a year – causing a rigid chunk of Tibet to be ‘pushed out’ to the East.
A team led by Dr Tim Wright of Oxford University used a technique called Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR), which can measure movement in the Earth’s surface with a precision of millimetres. Using InSAR data from the European Remote Sensing satellites gathered between 1992 and 1999, the team measured surface motion across a 500 kilometre long stretch of Western Tibet. They found barely any movement along the two faults: at most Karakoram was slipping at seven millimetres per year and Altyn Tagh by less than 15 millimetres per year.
