Geoscientist Ana Gibbons is investigating how the India Ocean grew to its present size and form
By Pristine Ong 11 February 2013 - Sydney geoscientist Ana Gibbons is helping to shed light on how the Indian Ocean grew to its present size and form. Supported by the Australia-India Strategic Research Fund, Ana has collaborated with India's National Institute of Oceanography and the Australian National University to gather and exchange magnetic data from the seafloor. Using this data, she has reconstructed the movement of tectonic plates to map the history of the Indian Ocean after Australia and India separated in the Gondwana split more than 100 million years ago. "It's a bit like doing a really big 3D jigsaw puzzle," she says. Her findings are giving scientists new insights into the age and nature of Australia's western margins. Her reconstructions show that after the continental split, some Indian regions were transferred back to the Australian plate. Rough the size of Tasmania, they remained sunken in the seafloor roughly 500-1000 kilometers from the western coast of Australia.
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