Drakensberg

The Drakensberg forms the Great Escarpment of southern Africa, running along the borders of South Africa and Lesotho and holding Thabana Ntlenyana, at roughly 3,482 meters the highest peak in southern Africa. Its dramatic basalt-capped cliffs sit atop the sedimentary Clarens Formation sandstone of the Karoo Supergroup, the basalt itself erupted around 182 million years ago as part of the Karoo-Ferrar large igneous province, one of the massive flood-basalt events associated with the early breakup of the Gondwana supercontinent. The range's present cliff-and-escarpment shape was carved afterward, as rivers draining toward the Indian Ocean cut headward into the plateau edge and the escarpment retreated inland over tens of millions of years, the same escarpment-retreat process that shapes this section's other great-escarpment entries. This combination of ancient flood basalt and long-term erosional retreat has left a landscape of sheer basalt cliffs, dramatic amphitheaters and sandstone buttresses recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. This entity documents the Drakensberg specifically as a geological formation, a basalt-capped great escarpment shaped by long-term erosional retreat following Gondwana-breakup flood volcanism.