Great Escarpment, Southern Africa

The Great Escarpment is a major topographical feature in Africa that consists of steep slopes from the high central Southern African plateau downward in the direction of the oceans that surround southern Africa on three sides. While it lies predominantly within the borders of South Africa, in the east the escarpment extends northward to form the border between Mozambique and Zimbabwe, continuing on beyond the Zambezi river valley to form the Muchinga Escarpment in eastern Zambia. In the west, it extends northward into Namibia and Angola. It is the combination of this escarpment and the aridity of Southern Africa that leads to the lack of navigable rivers in South Africa.

Different names are applied to different stretches of the Great Escarpment, the most well-known section being the Drakensberg (diagram on the right). The Schwarzrand and edge of the Khomas Highland in Namibia, as well as the Serra da Chela in Angola, are also well-known names.

About 180 million years ago, a mantle plume under southern Gondwana caused bulging of the continental crust in the area that would later become southern Africa. Within 10–20 million years, rift valleys formed on either side of the central bulge and flooded to become the proto-Atlantic Ocean and proto-Indian Ocean more or less along the present southern African coastline and separating the Southern Cape from the Falkland Plateau. The stepped, steep walls of these rift valleys formed escarpments that surrounded the newly formed Southern African subcontinent.

During the past 20 million years, southern Africa has experienced further massive uplifting, especially in the east, with the result that most of the plateau lies above 1,000 m (3,300 ft) despite extensive erosion. The plateau is tilted such that it is highest in the east and slopes gently downward toward the west and south. Typically, the elevation of the edge of the eastern escarpments is in excess of 2,000 m (6,600 ft). It reaches its highest point of over 3,000 m (9,800 ft) where the escarpment forms part of the international border between Lesotho and the South African province of KwaZulu-Natal.

With the widening of the Atlantic, Indian, and Southern oceans, southern Africa became tectonically quiescent. Earthquakes rarely occur in the region, and there has been no volcanic or orogenic activity for approximately 50 million years. An almost uninterrupted period of erosion continues to the present, removing layers many kilometers thick from the surface of the plateau and moving the present position of the escarpment approximately 150 kilometres (93 mi) inland from the original fault lines that formed the walls of the rift valley along the coastline during the break-up of Gondwana. Consequently, a thick layer of marine sediment was deposited onto the continental shelf (the lower steps of the original rift valley walls) that surrounds the subcontinent, creating the present-day coastal plain. The rate of the erosion of the escarpment in the Drakensberg region is said to average 1.5 m (5 ft) per 1000 years, or 1.5 millimetres (1⁄16 in) per year.

Because of erosion throughout most of the Mesozoic and Cenozoic eras, none of the plateau's surface rocks (except the Kalahari sands) are younger than 180 million years. The youngest rocks that remain cap the plateau in Lesotho and form the steep sides of the Great Escarpment in this region. These are the Clarens Formation laid down under desert conditions about 200 million years ago, topped by a 1,600 m (5,200 ft) thick layer of lava that erupted and covered most of southern Africa, and indeed large parts of Gondwana, approximately 180 million years ago.

Erosional retreat means that the rocks exposed on the coastal plain are, with very few and small exceptions, older than those that cap the escarpment. The rocks found in the Lowveld below the Mpumalanga portion of the Great Escarpment are more than 3 billion years old. As the escarpment retreated inland, the Cape Fold Mountains that had formed 150 million years earlier and been buried under sediments from the Himalaya-sized range of Gondwana mountains were gradually re-exposed. Being composed of erosion-resistant quartzitic sandstone, they remained as the less resistant overlying sediments were removed, ultimately to form the parallel formations that protrude from the coastal plain of the south and southwest Cape. In the main, the rocks of the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands belong to the Beaufort and Ecca Groups (of the Karoo Supergroup), aged 220–310 million years.

The eastern portion of the Great Escarpment goes as far north as Tzaneen at approximately the 22° S parallel, and from there veers west to Mokopane, where it is known as the Strydpoort Mountains. The absence of the Great Escarpment for approximately 450 km (280 mi) to the north of Tzaneen (to reappear on the border between Zimbabwe and Mozambique in the Chimanimani Mountains) is due to a failed westerly branch of the main rift that caused Antarctica to start drifting away from southern Africa during the breakup of Gondwana about 150 million years ago. The lower Limpopo River and Save River drain into the Indian Ocean through what remains of this relict incipient rift valley, which now forms part of the South African Lowveld.