Chapter One

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CONTINENTAL CATACLYSM


For tens of millions of years Nature has chiseled and sculpted Tibet unlike any other place in the world. It is as austere as it is awesome. Cataclysmic geological forces over the last seventy–five million years have pushed millions of square miles of Earth’s crust northward over the ocean. The continental drift has moved what is now known as the Indian plate over 6,000 miles in 50 million years. The final phase of this tectonic crunch began about 25 million years ago when the Indian plate started literally ramming into the Eurasian (Laurasian) plate and began dredging the Tethys Sea with a force whose extent is still not fully understood. This powerful phenomenon carried with it a future history that defined many modern nation–states of Asia, their civilizations, their religions, their cultures, and their conflicts. Tibet has been at the center of this bewildering tectonic spectacle.

From an ordinary human perspective the time span may seem enormous and the pace of the drift impossibly slow, but in geological terms this is normal, considering the gigantic blocks of Earth’s crust involved in this movement. A time–lapse cinematic perspective of the great crunch would reveal one of the most awe–inspiring occurrences in the planet’s history. According to geologists, Tibet emerged as a hot and wet plane from under the sea between fourteen and eighteen million years ago, the era they call the late middle Miocene. Some fifteen million years before the present, the phase began wherein this tectonic union would elevate the land and turn it into the highest mountain range on Earth. With the formation of t