Three RondavelsThe three hills seen at the center and right of this frame are known as the Three Ron

Three RondavelsThe three hills seen at the center and right of this frame are known as the Three Rondavels. A rondavel is a traditional “beehive-shaped hut” used by the inhabitants of South Africa; these columns are so named because of the shape at the top. They are found at the edge of the Drakensberg Escarpment in Mpumalanga, South Africa, high above the Blyde River below.The cliffs of the Drakensberg are the remnant of the breakup of the supercontinent Gondwana. During the Jurassic, just under 200 million years ago, a large landmass made of what is today India, Australia, Africa, Antarctica, and South America broke up into pieces that drifted apart. This separation of continents left scars and cliffs on the landscape, including the Drakensberg. Today those cliffs are being reworked by erosion into the landscape seen here.The rocks exposed at this site are the Black Reef Quartzite, the metamorphosed remnants of a 2 billion year old sedimentary sequence of sandstones and mudstones. They are broken by vertical fractures called joints that allow water into the tough, metamorphic rocks. This water is eroding those rock layers into columns. The mudstones are the weaker of these layers; where they are exposed they weather out, leaving flat layers. The cone shape at the top is formed by erosion of the hard, metamorphic quartzite.-JBBImage credit: https://flic.kr/p/21UXuvcReferences:https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00189340http://bit.ly/2BfbqHlhttp://bit.ly/1Nn5j89 -- source link

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