At https://phys.org/news/2025-10-island-ancient-rifting-reshaped-madagascar.html … Madagascar’s landscape tells a geological story, we are told. Ancient rifting and tilting of its landscape sculpted its dramatic topography. Madagascar also has a biodivers fauna and flora. The lemurs, for example. The rifting tore the island away from Africa, and some what later, 80 million years ago, it was ripped away from India. The first rifting occurred around 170 million years ago and is responsible for its rugged western escarpment – and a plateau tilted towards the east. Then, in the late Cretaceous, rifting on the eastern side of the island ripped it away from the Seychelles and India. The Seychelles was the little bit stranded in between. Whether this also included Mauritius and the Chagos is unsaid. At that time the land tilted towards the west. Rivers reversed their courses as one consequence and the western escarpment was partly swallowed up by the ocean. This led to an eastern escarpment feature – which is still the situation today.
Over time the western escarpment eroded into a worn down landscape of remnant highlands and low relief plateaus. At the same time the eastern side developed a young, steep, escarpment. The big point made is that Madagascar was for a long time isolated from the rest of the world and evolved, differently. Over 90% of its mammals and reptiles exist nowhere else in the world, and 80% of its plants, also. The geology of the rifting processes fragmented the environment and species developed independently, adapting to their immediate habitat.
The next query should have been. Was this the result of plate tectonics – or an expanding earth.