Kenya Mountains

Kenya Mountains

The geography of Kenya is complex. Kenya is a country in Eastern Europe, and is crossed by the equator. Despite being an equatorial country, and tropical, it presents very different climates. In the north it is the desert air, and in the central and southern highlands, with forests and savannas. The country is crossed by long mountain ranges.
Overall, the morphological element that most characterizes Kenya is the Rift Valley, passing through it from north to south. The inland waters are freshwater lakes and saltwater; many are also geysers. Few however rivers, only two of which have a flow rate and a length worthy of note.The highlands of Kenya, along with Ethiopian highlands, are the highest sections of the so-called “Africa high”: the average altitude is higher than 2000 m, which explains the happy atmosphere of the Kenyan land. The Highlands have taken existing features, following the formation of the Rift Valley, which runs through the territory of Kenya with its eastern branch. The largest fracture coincides, in the North, with the reservoir of the Turkana, whose elongated shape is a clear indication of its tectonic origin; it continues to the south with the collapse occupied by several lakes (the Baringo, the Bogoria (Hannington), the Nakuru) and finally with the groove  of Ewaso Ngiro and lakes Magadi and Natron, on the border with Tanzania.
The edges of the pit formed in the central section, a magnificent dual mountainous alignment, with the Aberdare Range (3999 m in the upstream Lesatima or Satima) on one side and the Mau Escarpment (3099 m) on the other. These are partly covered by cenozoic volcanic expansions, superimposed on the archeozoic crystalline substrate, which emerges in wide areas of the country. At the same volcanic activity connects the birth of the great cones that dominate the Highlands, including at the borders of Kenya the Kilimanjaro (5895 m), but it rises in the territory of Tanzania, and the Elgon (4321 m), on the border with Uganda. The highest peak of the country is Mount Kenya (5199 m), a giant pillar emerged at a time when it formed the fracture of the Rift Valley, while on the floor of the Great Rift Valley is the Menengai Crater (2272 meters), a massive shield volcano with one of the largest calderas in the world.The morphology of the Highlands has no big bumps: the profiles are open, but there are here and there Inselberg o Monadnock, the rise in the middle of a plain of ancient granitic rocks. The extinct volcano of Mount Longonot (2780 m) emerges as a monolith from the bush. Inside the plateau drops quickly to the Lake Victoria basin, whose southern coast is Mount Homa a mountain dating from the Miocene and Pleistocene, along with the active Ol Doinyo Lengai (Tanzania), it is one of the few volcanoes worldwide format carbonatite lava. On the eastern side of the plateau rather gradually it lowers, with a series of terraces, to the coastal plain, which, not very wide at the height of Mombasa, extends north of the Galana River, until reaching 200 km to the border with Somalia. The coast is low, fragmented by small islands and lagoons, and impractical; no shortage longest coral reefs. The northern part of the country finally – the southern extremity of the Ethiopian Highlands – has an average altitude of ca. 800 m and is dominated by granitic emergencies (Huri mountains, 1480 m; Jibisa, 1605 m) in a typical savannah landscape.