How were The Western Ghats Formed?
The Western Ghats is a mountain range that is parallel to the western coast of the Indian peninsula, traversing the states of Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Goa, Maharashtra, and Gujarat. It is one of the eight hotspots of biological diversity in the world. States surrounding the range depends heavily on western ghats for irrigation, agricultural purposes, and tourism.
The western ghats are older than the mighty Himalayas. It is formed after millions of years of chaos. They are considered as the mountainous faulted and eroded edge of the Deccan Plateau. Geologic evidence indicates that they were formed during the break-up of the supercontinent of Gondwana some 150 million years ago. Gondwana has consisted of modern South America, Africa, Madagascar, India, Australia and Antarctica.
When the Gondwana break-up happened, the Indian plate detached and travelled towards the Eurasian plate. There is a theory that the west coast of India came into being somewhere around 100 to 80 million years ago after it broke away from Madagascar. After the break-up, the western coast of India would have appeared as an abrupt cliff some 1,000 metres in height.
Soon after detachment, Indian plate drifted over Reunion hotspot, a volcanic hotspot in the earth’s lithosphere near the present-day location of Reunion ( 21°06′S, 55°31′E).
It moved up in this drift and the heat beneath the generated basaltic magma rose upward causing uplift by crustal arching. This geological event that took place about 120–130 million years ago gave rise to the Western Ghats and the Indian plate was inclined in an easterly direction. Afterwards, a series of volcanic eruptions for million years gave rise to the extensive Deccan Traps and thereby moulded the Northern Western Ghats to a large extent. Since the Western Ghats are the result of upliftment the underlying rocks are ancient. In some parts of Nilgris, we could find ancient rocks as a piece of evidence for this. These ancient rocks are 200 million years old.
