Africa - You are Here: Around the World in 92 Minutes - page 20

Brukkaros Mountain, southern Namibia
A hole in the Earth's skin makes you wonder: volcano, or meteorite impact? Here,
lava or weathering has carved deep ravines down the sides, so it's clearly a vol-
cano—extinct, but aging gracefully. In a place that gets very little rain, things last
longer. Look at the Moon: a meteorite crashes into it and the crater looks basically
unchanged for a billion years, because there's no weathering, no vegetation. With
Brukkaros, the story started underground. Rising magma hit groundwater and heated
it until it blew out of a vent, blasting rock fragments up into this pile. It's not quite the
Moon, so over the past 80 million years there have been some changes; erosion has
deepened the depression, leaving a well-preserved ring mountain that might have
been ground down to dust in another climate.