Lava plateau

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This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please improve this article if you can. (October 2006)

A lava plateau is a broad, elevated tableland or flat-topped highland, usually many hundreds or thousands of square kilometers in extent, underlain by a thick succession of lava flows, most of which are tholeiitic basalts and the product of fissure eruptions.

One example is the Columbia Plateau in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho; it is 160,000 km² (63,000 square miles) in area and 1.8 km (~6,000 ft) thick. Another example is the Deccan Plateau in India.

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