Towards the end of the Cretaceous the north-west part of the Indian Peninsula was converted into a great centre of vulcanicity of a type which has no parallel among the volcanic phenomena of the modern world.Hundreds of thousands of square miles of the country between southern Rajputana and Dharwar, and in breadth almost from coast to coast, were inundated by basic lavas which covered, under thousands of feet of basalts, all the previous topographyof the country, and converted it into an immense volcanic plateau. This series of eruptions proceeded from fissures and cracks in the surface of the earth from which highly liquid lavas welled out intermittently, till a thickness of some thousands of feet of horizontally bedded sheets of basalts had resulted (The Seismicity of Northern India by B.K. Chadha).