Southeastern margin of the Tibetan Plateau stopped expanding in the late Miocene

Abstract

The birth and expansion of continental plateaus exert a strong control on our planet's climate and the distribution and evolution of its biodiversity. It has been proposed that the Tibetan Plateau has been steadily growing by southward expansion. Here we demonstrate that the shape of the southeastern margin of the plateau has remained unchanged for the last 10 Myr despite vast amounts of exhumation. Our finding is based on a new, high-resolution thermochronological dataset from the deep gorges of the Salween and Mekong rivers, which we interpret using a physics-based model combined with an optimization method. We show that our scenario also agrees with a wide range of other, independent geological and geophysical data. This finding demonstrates that plateau margins can reach large-scale topographic steady-state between outward growth and surface erosion, which has important implications for our understanding of the evolution of Earth's climate and biodiversity in the recent geological past.