Last week was my first visit to Cape Town, a place about which I had heard much, both before and after I moved to South Africa. A lot of this talk revolved about how different the Cape is from the rest of the country. I’ll agree that, as a city, it did seem a bit more relaxed than Johannesburg; I certainly liked the fact that the city centre felt a bit more accessible. However, I can’t really say I got that “more European” vibe that some had told me about. Still, there was one thing that made me feel a bit more at home: old rocks actually look old:
These pictures were taken as I wandered along the sea front between Three Anchor Bay and Seapoint, and show interbedded sandstones and shales of the Malmesbury Group. The age of these rocks is somewhat poorly constrained, but they’re thought to be late Neoproterozoic to earliest Cambrian in age – somewhere between 500 and 700 million years old. And, because they are located away from the stable cratonic interior of southern Africa, they actually look old – they’ve been quite strongly folded, are fairly heavily jointed and fractured, and look fairly baked too. My geological instincts, honed back in the UK where ‘Precambrian’ is almost a synonym for fubarite, have always been somewhat dizzied by my many encounters in the past couple of years with rocks that have hung around for 2 or 3 billion years with nothing much happening to them. This seems much more comfortable, and familiar.
So, geologically at least, Cape Town does have a European vibe after all. More pictures to follow in the next couple of days.
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