The second-largest canyon on earth — 550m deep, 160km long, cut by an ancient river through 1.8 billion-year-old rock in the Namibian desert
Fish River Canyon in the southern Karas Region of Namibia is the largest canyon in Africa and the second-largest in the world after the Grand Canyon — 160km long, up to 27km wide, and 550m deep, carved by the Fish River through Precambrian rock that formed 1.8 billion years ago (among the oldest exposed geology on the planet's surface). The canyon is bisected by the Fish River, which flows only seasonally — during the dry season (April to September, when hiking is permitted), the riverbed is a series of pools separated by dry gravel banks, lined with fever trees and sheltering hippos and Nile…
The Fish River Canyon was created by two geological processes over 500 million years: tectonic plate movement caused the ancient Gondwana supercontinent's crust to fracture and subside (creating the initial rift valley structure), and the Fish River then eroded the canyon down through the existing fault valley over hundreds of millions of years. The Nama people (one of the Khoikhoi pastoralist peoples of Namibia and South Africa, speaking the click language Khoekhoegowab) inhabited the canyon environs for thousands of years before European contact, using the Fish River's seasonal pools as a r…