Indian Plate Kinematics studies by GPS GEODESY using 15 years of continuous GPS/GNSS data

Indian plate kinematics is continuously monitored using GNSS geodesy. 15 years of GPS/GNSS data from 1995 to 2010 from the Hyderabad IGS GPS Permanent Station (HYDE) have been processed using Bernese 5.0 in the global network solution in ITRF 2005 reference frame along with the data from other 11 IGS stations. A new global network was chosen spreading the geographical and azimuthal coverage, which almost includes all the plates surrounding India. The baseline lengths from Hyderabad to other chosen sites and the rate of changes were also estimated. Indian Plate motion was estimated to be at the rate of 37 ± 0.2 mm/yr towards NNE direction with respect to Eurasian Plate. Despite many large earthquakes in and around India, reorganization of the macro and micro plates and interaction between the plate pairs and its boundaries, the rate of on-going Indian plate motion remains to be the same. The angular velocity of Indian plate motion with respect to Eurasian plate and Indo-Eurasia plate pair have also been estimated. The global network solution has resulted in the estimation of the pole of the angular velocity vector of India with respect to Eurasia to be about a pole of rotation at 29.44 ± 1.2deg N, 13.2 ± 7.3 deg E with an angular velocity of 0.356 ± 0.035 deg Myr-1. Our estimated result of Indian plate motion mostly conforms to the REVEL-2000 Plate motion model but differs considerably from NUVEL-1A and other earlier studies. This departure could be attributed to the difference in geologic and geodetic estimations. The longer time span of GNSS data from the central part of India yields more accurate estimations since the analysis is in the global network solution, which doesn't take into account the plate-interior site velocities.