ABOUT 50 MILLION YEARS AGO, India was a large island off the Australian coast.
In one of the great tectonic movements of the Earth’s crust, India sailed off northward at a rate of about 1.5 inches a year, crunching into the Asian land mass. It heaved up the hulking Eurasian plate and created the east–west-oriented Himalayan mountains and the high, lonely stretches of Tibet.
From Afghanistan on the west to Tibet on the east, the Indian plate slowly crunched northward, but on its eastern side, it also crunched eastward, forming
