page_title: Deccan Plateau
section_title: The Deccan Traps
hierarchical_section_title: Deccan Plateau / The Deccan Traps
caption_attribution_description: Photo of Rajgad Fort taken from Pabe Ghat.
context_page_description: The Deccan Plateau is a large plateau that covers most of South India. It is triangular, surrounded by three mountain ranges. It extends over eight Indian states.
  The plateau covers 422,000 square kilometres, 43 percent of India's landmass.
  The uplands, areas of higher landmass, form a triangle that is nested in the familiar downward-pointing triangle of the Indian sub-continent's coastline. In the south of India, the plateau is largely over 1,000 metres above sea level. In the north it is mostly about 500 metres above sea level.
  The plateau is extremely large, and there are many habitats: different ecosystems with different sorts of vegetation, climate, geology and animals. The forests on the plateau are older than the Himalayan mountains.
  On the west of the plateau are the Western Ghats and in the east are the Eastern Ghats. These mountain ranges rise from their nearby coastal plains and nearly meet at the southern tip of India. The mountains make the southward-pointing vertex of a triangle. The northern boundary of the triangle is made up by the Satpura Range and Vindhya Range.
context_section_description: The Deccan Traps are a main cause of the special geography and geology of South India. They are a large igneous province on the Deccan Plateau of west-central India (between 17–24N, 73–74E) and one of the largest volcanic features on the planet. They consist of multiple layers of solidified flood basalt that are more than 2,000 m (6,562 ft) thick and cover an area of 500,000 square kilometres (190,000 sq mi). The term 'trap', used in geology for such rock formations, is derived from the Dutch word for stairs, referring to the step-like hills forming the landscape of the region.
caption: The Deccan Traps near Pune
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