Somalaya
The Somalaya or Somalaya Mountains is a mountain range that, according to computer models, will form along the west coast of India in about 200 million years. This will happen during future plate tectonics of the Indian Ocean and the collision of India, Somalia and Madagascar. This collision is the result of the breaking away of Somalia from the Great Rift Valley in Africa and its drift towards India. This also causes subduction of the current Indian Ocean.
The computer models describing the formation of the Somalaya Mountains were designed by geologists from Utrecht University. The results were published in 2021. The geologists drew up a series of rules that tell which parts of the current Indian Ocean, which includes a number of small continents such as Seychelles, will be scraped off and which will not, and how India, Somalia and Madagascar will deform in the distant future. There were no such rules before.
The Utrecht geologists drew up the rules on the basis of their work on mountains all over the world. This was a first: the world's first 'recipe' for mountain formation. The research for which the models were used was accepted for publication in the American Journal of Science on 12 January 2021.
The name of the new mountain range was coined by the same researchers.
References
- Mountains of the future: the collision of India, Somalia and Madagascar, Utrecht University, 29 April 2021
This article "Somalaya" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:Somalaya. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.
