Langkawi was born in the Cambrian era as a broad sedimentary mound at the bottom of a turbulent sea just north of the equator. Tectonic plate movements carried the mound, as part of the Gondwanaland super continent, south to the cold Antarctic regions where the sea froze above it and this moving glacier crushed the limestone, sandstone and siltstone into a base of hard granite and marble. There it was built on again over a period of some 400 million years through a series of deposits of various materials from sea life skeletons to glacial droppings. Then, during the Permian time some 290 million years ago, its underlying plate broke away from this continent and moved northward back across the equator and eventually, in a cataclysmic event accompanied by exploding volcanoes and hot lava flows, it crashed up againts the East Malaysia/Indochina block in an earth shattering collision which pushed whole blocks of it all the way to the surface to from the Peninsular Malaysia.