India's Eastern Ghats and East Antarctica were once the same mountain belt — the billion-year-old Rayner–Eastern Ghats Orogen.
The Eastern Ghats are a broken, discontinuous range of ancient high-grade metamorphic rock along India’s east coast. Because most of the original mountain range has long since eroded away, the rocks now exposed once lay deep beneath it — subjected to immense heat and pressure that gave them their striking textures, mineral assemblages, and appearance.
Their signature rock is khondalite — named after the Khond people (found across Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Chhattisgarh) — a rare high-grade metamorphic rock also found in the Rayner Complex of East Antarctica. The two share rock ages, mineral and geochemical signatures, isotopic signatures and metamorphic histories: strong evidence they were once part of a single ancient mountain belt, the Rayner–Eastern Ghats Orogen, when India and East Antarctica were fused together in the supercontinents Rodinia and, later, Gondwana. Rocks now separated by more than 8,000 km were once the same landscape, nearly a billion years ago.
Khondalite’s true aesthetic shows in landmark architecture — the Jagannath Temple in Puri and the UNESCO-listed Konark Sun Temple. And the Ghats still shape their region today: recharging groundwater, steering rainfall through orographic effects, and sheltering diverse tropical and subtropical forests.
Sources
- Chatterjee, S. & Gupta, S. (2020). Correlation of the Eastern Ghats, India and East Antarctica: Reconstructing a Supercontinental Fragment.
- Pichamuthu, C. S. (1966). Charnockites of India and Antarctica: A Comparison.
- Upadhyay, D. et al. (2009). The Proterozoic Eastern Ghats Belt. Journal of the Virtual Explorer.