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As the relief map shows, South Africa is in the west, south and east surrounded by a cornice of mountains. This chain, consisting of many single mountain ranges, is known as the Great Escarpment. In the east, in the area of the Drakensberg of Natal and in the Kingdom of Lesotho, it reaches heights of almost 4,000 metres. In the south and west, the highest peaks are at a bout 2,000 metres.
In front of the escarpment, there is a partially very narrow coastal strip, which is called the Lowveld. At the Indian Ocean, these coastal plains have high precipitations and are fertile. The western part, however, is, due to the cold Benguela current of the Atlantic, a coastal desert, reaching up to Namibia and Angola.
After crossing the escarpment, one gets to the central high plateau of South Africa, called the Highveld. It has heights of between 1,000 and 1,700 metres. It slowly declines towards the north, to the Kalahari basin that doesn't have an outlet. Because the surrounding mountain chain forms a catchment area for the clouds from the sea, the precipitation on the Highveld is low which results in arid, semi-desert conditions.
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The Geological Profile of
South Africa
The land mass of South Africa is very old and particularly rich in mineral resources. The mountain socle was already part of the supercontinent Gondwanaland which, 300 to 100 million years ago broke into many parts that built whole new continents, Africa being one of them.
Through the following, millions of years lasting geological shifts, tectonic arching, breaking and the formation of crevasses, the resulting outbreak of volcanoes, depressions, the deposition of gravel and wind and water erosion the geological profile of the land has formed.
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