Fish River Canyon Geology & Deep Time

The walls of Fish River Canyon expose over a billion years of geological history in a single glance. The basement gneiss at the canyon floor is 1.8 billion years old. Above it, sedimentary layers record the Gondwana glaciation (300 million years ago) when this region was under ice. The canyon itself was carved over the last 600 million years by the Fish River. No other location in Namibia makes Earth’s deep time so viscerally tangible.