Unlike the high mountain ranges found in places like the Rockies (highest peak ), the European Alps (highest peak ) or the Himalayas (highest peak ), the Australian Alps were not formed by two continental plates colliding and pushing up the Earth's rocky mantle to form jagged rocky peaks. Instead, the Australian Alps consist of a high plateau, with significantly softer rolling hills spread across a long, wide plateau that was uplifted thousands of feet by the movement of magma when Gondwana began to break up between 130 and 160 million years ago. The highest peak in the Australian Alps is Mt Kosciuszko ().