Fig. 5: Cenozoic subduction and Tibetan evolution.

a–h Snapshots of the modeled material field and surface topography. The material figures: blue triangles mark the active trench, and grey triangles mark the abandoned ones; Green arrows demonstrate the melting locations, while the blue ones present the locations for oceanic slab dehydration. The red and green bold arrows in the topography figures demonstrate the locations where uplift and subsidence happen, respectively. The light green box in h marks the range of accreted crust before the indentation of the Indian Subcontinent. The melting/fluid tracers are sampled every 50 km, and their velocities are from Eqs. S16-S17 in Methods. The modeled histories of deviatoric stress, viscosity, density, and strain rate for the best-fit Type 6 model are shown in Figures S1-S4, with additional sensitivity tests on the robustness of model results in Figures S17–S20 and Liu et al., 2021a. More discussion on the differences between Type 5 and 6 models is in the supplements. u.c.-upper crust, m.c.-middle crust, l.c.-lower crust, l.m.-lithospheric mantle, sed.-sediments.