Douwe J.J. van Hinsbergen 

The India-Asia collision zone is the archetype to calibrate geological responses of continent-continent collision, but hosts a paradox: there is no orogen-wide geological record of oceanic subduction after initial collision around 60-55 Ma, yet thousands of kilometers of post-collisional subduction occurred before arrival of unsubductable continental lithosphere that currently horizontally underlies Tibet. I show that kinematically restoring incipient horizontal underthrusting accurately predicts geologically estimated diachronous slab break-off, unlocking the Miocene of Himalaya-Tibet as natural laboratory for unsubductable lithosphere convergence. Additionally, three end-member paleogeographic scenarios exist with different predictions for the nature of post-collisional subducting lithosphere but each is defended and challenged based on similar data types. Here, I attempt at breaking through this impasse by identifying how the three paleogeographic scenario each challenge paradigms in geodynamics, orogenesis, magmatism, or paleogeographic reconstruction and identify opportunities for methodological advances in paleomagnetism, sediment provenance analysis, and seismology to conclusively constrain Greater Indian paleogeography.