← Back to the map

One of the oldest mountain systems on Earth — now worn down to low ridges, but once a towering Proterozoic range.

The Aravalli Range is among the oldest fold-mountain systems in the world. It was built during the Proterozoic, through the long Aravalli–Delhi cycle of mountain-building that welded together some of the crust of northwestern India roughly two and a half to one billion years ago.

What we see today is the deeply eroded root of that range. Hundreds of millions of years of weathering have reduced once-high peaks to a chain of low, rounded ridges running roughly from Gujarat through Rajasthan towards Delhi.

The belt is also economically important: its ancient metamorphic and igneous rocks host major deposits of zinc, lead and marble that have been worked since antiquity.

Sources

• Geological Survey of India

A short reference note: this summary draws on third-party sources such as the Geological Survey of India and Wikipedia. In time I plan to give every geological feature its own learning-oriented write-up — with custom diagrams, graphs, and study pointers — as I’ve already done for the 11 locations that have an Instagram reel.