A History of Agriculture in India v1.c7.17

v1.c7.17

Fig. 2. During the upper Cretaceous, stupendous volcanic outbursts overwhelmed a vast area in what is now Gujarat, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh. From the lava, the black cotton soil was formed over the ages The upheaval of the Himalayas has taken place in three major phases. The earliest phase was at the close of the Eocene, when the Eocene nummulitic limestone and the underlying older strata that had been accumulating on the floor of the Tethys since the upper Carboniferous were uplifted into ranges of considerable altitude (4,500-6,000 metres), found in Kashmir, Hundesh and in parts of eastern Tibet. With this uplift, all traces of the Tethys in the Himalayan region vanished. The next upheaval took place towards the close of the Miocene when the sediments deposited by rivers in estuaries along the flanks of the infant Himalayas were upraised. These now constitute the middle or lesser Himalayas. The last upheaval started after the Tertiary and continued into the sub-Recent through the Pleistocene. The movements involved the uppermost Siwalik freshwater sediments.