Plateau, extensive area of flat upland usually bounded by an escarpment (i.e.

, steep
slope) on all sides but sometimes enclosed by mountains. The essential criteria for
plateaus are low relative relief and some altitude.

The Columbia Plateau is uniformly covered with basaltic lava flows and spans an area of about
100,000 square miles in Idaho, Washington, and Oregon.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Although plateaus stand at higher elevation than surrounding terrain, they differ from
mountain ranges in that they are remarkably flat. Some plateaus, like the Altiplano in
southern Peru and western Bolivia, are integral parts of mountain belts. Others, such as
the Colorado Plateau (across which the Colorado River has cut the Grand Canyon), were
produced by processes very different from those that built neighbouring mountain
ranges. Some plateaus—for example, the Deccan plateau of central India—occur far
from mountain ranges. The differences among plateaus can be ascribed to the different
geologic processes that have created them.

Geomorphic characteristics
The high flat surface that defines a plateau can continue for hundreds or even thousands
of kilometres, as in the case of the Plateau of Tibet. In spite of the paucity of roads, one
can drive over most of that plateau, where elevations exceed 4,500 metres (about 14,760
feet), and encounter less relief than in some major cities of the world (e.g., San
Francisco or Rio de Janeiro). Although ranges of hills and mountains rise above the rest
of the plateau, their topography too is rather gentle.

Plateaus dissected (eroded) by rivers have remarkably uniform maximum elevations,

but their surfaces can be interrupted by deep canyons. In the case of some regions
described as plateaus, the surface is so dissected that one does not see any flat terrain.
Instead, such a plateau is defined by a uniform elevation of the highest ridges and
mountains. The eastern part of the Plateau of Tibet, which constitutes the headwaters of
many of the great rivers of Asia (e.g., Huang He, Yangtze, Mekong, Salween, and
Irrawaddy), is dissected into deep canyons separated by narrow, steep ridges; the high
uniform elevation that characterizes plateaus is only barely discernible in that area.

Formative processes
The formation of a plateau requires one of the same three types of tectonic processes
that create mountain ranges—volcanism, crustal shortening (by the thrusting of one
block or slice of crust over another or by the folding of layers of rock), and thermal
expansion. The simplest of these is thermal expansion of the lithosphere (or the
replacement of cold mantle lithosphere by hot