The Arabian platform ( plate ) is one of the ancient platform form , stable blocks of the earth's crust , geographically corresponding to the Arabian Peninsula . The area of the Arabian platform is 0.12082 steradian or approximately 2 million km² .
The plate borders are: in the east - the Indo-Australian plate , in the south - the African plate , in the west the border with the African plate is the Red Sea rift and the Dead Sea rift, in the north the Arabian plate is connected by a converged border with the Anatolian and Eurasian plates.
During the Phanerozoic ( Paleozoic - Cenozoic ), the Arabian plate was part of the African plate and still has not completely lost contact with it, so they are sometimes considered as components of a single African-Arabian platform. The Red Sea appeared at the beginning of the Eocene , but the separation of Africa from Arabia took place in the Oligocene , and since then the Arabian plate has slowly shifted towards the Eurasian plate.
In the modern era, the Arabian Plate is one of three large tectonic plates (along with the African and Hindustan ), which are northward-moving fragments of Gondwana , whose collision with Eurasia led to the formation of a wide Mediterranean Alpine folding belt from the Pyrenees in the west to the mountains of Southeast Asia and the western Sunda Islands . The pressure of the Arabian Plate directly on the Eurasian is the reason for the formation of the Zagros mountain system in Iran , on the Anatolian - it contributes to the formation of the Taurus mountain system in Turkey