Table Mountain

Table Mountain overlooks Cape Town, South Africa, reaching 1,084.6 meters with a topographic prominence of 1,068 meters. Its flat top is capped by roughly 600 meters of extremely hard quartzitic sandstone, known as Table Mountain Sandstone, dating to the Ordovician period between about 450 and 510 million years ago, underlain by a 70-meter-thick layer of distinctively maroon Graafwater Formation mudstone, which itself rests on late Precambrian basement granite and Malmesbury shale at least 40 million years older still. The mountain is part of the Cape Fold Mountains and owes its tabletop shape to having once been the floor of a syncline, a downward fold in the rock layers; as softer overlying rock eroded away over tens of millions of years, the highly erosion-resistant quartzitic sandstone was left standing as the flat-topped plateau visible today. This entity documents Table Mountain specifically as a geological formation, a flat-topped quartzitic sandstone plateau left standing by the erosion of a synclinal fold.