Great Escarpment, Geological escarpment in Southern Africa.

The Great Escarpment is a steep slope system separating southern Africa's interior plateau from the coastal plains facing the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. It runs predominantly through South Africa, extending north into Namibia and Angola in the west and to the Mozambique–Zimbabwe border and Zambia's Muchinga Escarpment in the east. Its best-known section is the Drakensberg, whose eastern edge exceeds 2,000 m and reaches over 3,000 m on the Lesotho–KwaZulu-Natal border.

About 180 million years ago a mantle plume under southern Gondwana bulged the crust, and rift valleys flooded to become the proto-Atlantic and proto-Indian oceans. The steep walls of those rifts formed the first escarpment around the new subcontinent. Erosion has since moved its position roughly 150 km inland from the original fault lines, and the Drakensberg section retreats at about 1.5 m per 1,000 years.

The escarpment's sections carry their own names: the Drakensberg ('Dragon Mountains') in the east, the Schwarzrand on the edge of Namibia's Khomas Highland, and the Serra da Chela in Angola. In the far north the Strydpoort Mountains near Mokopane continue the line. The Afrikaans name Groot Plato is also used for the feature.

The escarpment is not a single trail but a chain of separate sections, each reached from its own access road; the Drakensberg, the Khomas Highland and the Serra da Chela are entered independently. In Namibia the edge is cut by broad river valleys running toward the Namib, and between roughly 19° and 23° S it is eroded away for several hundred kilometres, replaced by a gently rising plain. Erosion in the Drakensberg averages about 1.5 mm per year.

The escarpment's position today lies about 150 km inland from the rift-valley fault lines that first formed it during the break-up of Gondwana. Erosion has moved the edge back at roughly 1.5 m per 1,000 years in the Drakensberg. Below the Mpumalanga section, the Lowveld exposes rocks more than 3 billion years old.