The Himalayas!

If anybody cares about my pallet, I stopped for some curry on my way over to the mountain range. My tongue did not agree with the food! Even in heaven I still favor Chinese food… Hey! Someone remind me to stop by their to grab some real grub!

 So I'm soaring over the Himalayas right now! Puffy white clouds make the most comfortable cushions for an angel. If I were still human though, I would go right through! 

http://i.pbase.com/u40/mreichel/upload/20419888.HimalayanSunsetDHU.jpg

Alas, if I were still alive, I would be shivering like a wet cat! So first off, the person who died was a Swedish climber (gotta love the Swedes!) on an expedition. His name was Fredrik Ericsson, and he fell, due to some nasty weather. Poor man, he never had a chance against the great mountains. The Himalayas are extremely tall, so that will serve as a nice transition to my next point of how they were created. If you ever cared to know a little about my history, I was learning about tectonic boundaries before the… grilled cheese mess. A shame that I didn’t even get to eat the sandwich… I might be able to say that I was… FUMING that I didn’t get any! Get it? Cause volcanoes fume?

Anyways, I was studying tectonic boundaries and how they affect our planet. The Himalayas are located through India, Nepal, and Pakistan.

http://static.howstuffworks.com/gif/willow/the-himalayas0.gif

The Himalayas are a result of the Indian and Eurasian plate colliding and forcing each other up, creating the mountains. Basically, India started moving towards Asia REALLY fast (for a continent), and when they collided… TAAADAA! The two continental plates met and made mountains! From my understanding, the two plates hit and went up because they were the same density, and less dense than the core of the earth. And before when I mentioned colliding, the funny thing is is that the process is called COLLISION!

Now the reason why my lovely murderers (volcanoes) are not located where the Himalayas are is because volcanoes form with an ocean plate and a continental plate. Here, there are two continental plates, so a mountain formed instead of a flaming beast. 

http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/dynamic/graphics/Fig21contcont.gif

My understanding of why high plateaus appear between mountain ranges is because the glaciers on the mountains erode the land into a flat plateau.

The Indian plate is still moving towards the Eurasian plate, and there is an estimation that the Indian plate is pushing the Asian plate two cm per year to the north. The collision in building up pressure continuously, and it does release it the pressure every now and then, which is what we know as earthquakes. The most recent earthquake was on January 26, 2001 in Bhuj.

Mountains are quite interesting, wouldn’t you agree? Next stop, we are headed towards some islands!