Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Khorat Plateau
Summary
The Khorat Plateau (ที่ราบสูงโคราช) is a plateau in the northeastern Thai region of Isan. The plateau forms a natural region, named after the short form of Nakhon Ratchasima, a historical barrier controlling access to and from the area.
The average elevation is and it covers an area of about . The saucer-shaped plateau is divided by a range of hills called the Phu Phan Mountains into two basins: the northern Sakhon Nakhon Basin, and the southern Khorat Basin. The plateau tilts from its northwestern corner where it is about above sea level to the southeast where the elevation is only about . Except for a few hills in the northeastern corner, the region is primarily gently undulating land, most of it varying in elevation from , tilting from the Phetchabun Mountains in the west down toward the Mekong River. The plateau is drained by the Mun and Chi Rivers, tributaries to the Mekong that forms the northeastern boundary of the area. It is separated from central Thailand by the Phetchabun Mountains and the Dong Phaya Yen Mountains in the west, the Sankamphaeng Range in the southwest and by the Dângrêk Mountains in the south, all of which historically made access to the plateau difficult.
These mountains together with the Truong Son Range in the northeast catch a lot of the rainfall, so the southwest monsoon has much lower intensity than in other regions—the mean annual rainfall in Nakhon Ratchasima is about , compared with in central Thailand. The difference between the dry and wet seasons is much greater, which makes the area less optimal for rice. The portion known as Tung Kula Rong Hai was once exceptionally arid.
The plateau uplifted from an extensive plain composed of remnants of the Cimmerian microcontinent, and terranes such as the Shan–Thai Terrane, either late in the Pleistocene or early in the Holocene Epoch, approximately Year 1 of the Holocene calendar. Much of the surface of the plateau was once classified as laterite, and layers that can easily be cut into brick-shaped blocks are still so called, but the classification of soils as various types of oxisols is more useful for agriculture.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.