Ruwenzori Mountains

The Ruwenzori Mountains, historically called the Mountains of the Moon, straddle the border of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda along the western branch of the East African Rift, holding Margherita Peak on Mount Stanley, at 5,109 meters the third-highest point in Africa. Unlike most of the high peaks along the East African Rift, which are volcanic, the Ruwenzori range is a non-volcanic fault-block, or horst, formed when a block of ancient Precambrian basement rock, over 2 billion years old in places, was pushed upward along steep bounding faults as the rift pulled the surrounding crust apart. That structural origin makes it one of the few major mountain ranges in equatorial Africa built by pure tectonic uplift rather than volcanism, and its great height combined with its location on the equator supports permanent glaciers and snowfields on several of its peaks, an unusual combination now increasingly threatened by their retreat. This entity documents the Ruwenzori Mountains specifically as a geological formation, a non-volcanic fault-block range of ancient basement rock uplifted along the western branch of the East African Rift.