Monsoons spinning the Earth’s plates

A new study from The Australian National University has for the first time confirmed that long-term climate change has the potential to spin the Earth's tectonic plates. Dr Giampiero Iaffaldano from the ANU Research School of Earth Sciences and colleagues in France and Germany have established a link between the motion of the Indian plate over the past 10 million years and a specific climate change event over the same period: the intensification of the Indian monsoon. Dr Iaffaldano said that the monsoon, which increased rainfall in northeast Indian by four metres annually, sped up motion in the Indian plate by almost one centimetre per year. ?The 100km-thick outer shell of Earth, the lithosphere, is divided into pieces called tectonic plates. Plates move in different directions at speeds in the order of centimetres per year, comparable to the speed of fingernail growth in humans. 'The significance of this finding lies in recognising for the first time that long-term climate changes have the potential to act as a force and influence the motion of tectonic plates. It is known that certain geologic events caused by plate motions ' for example the drift of continents, the closure of ocean basins and the building of large mountain belts - have the ability to influence climate patterns over a period of a million years.