[6][7][8] Until roughly 140 million years ago, the Indian plate formed part of the supercontinent, Gondwana, together with modern Africa, Australia, Antarctica, and South America.

[13] These authors propose a continental fragment of northern Gondwana rifted from India, traveled northward, and initiated the "soft collision" between the Greater Himalaya and Asia at ~50 Mya.

[10] The massive amounts of volcanic gases released during the passage of the Indian plate over the hotspots have been theorised to have played a role in the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, generally held to be due to a large asteroid impact.

[17] In 2020, however, geologists at the University of Oxford and the Alfred Wegener Institute found that new plate-motion models displayed increased movement speeds in all mid-ocean ridges during the late Cretaceous, a result irreconcilable to current theories of plate tectonics and a refutation of the plume-push hypothesis.

[18][19] The collision with the Eurasian plate along the boundary between India and Nepal formed the orogenic belt that created the Tibetan Plateau and the Himalaya Mountains, as sediment bunched up like earth before a plow.