From space, everything looks different. Without going any further, the flood of precipitation that has cracked face of the peninsula. Or that one of the human structures that are best seen from space are the greenhouses of Almería. From space the mountain ranges are striking, but in Africa a dark line that cuts the terrain for hundreds of kilometers draws attention and is not a road.
Its existence dates back 2.5 billion years, more than half of Earth’s history. And the reasons why it is still visible today also explain why it will be there for so many millions more: it is the Great Dam of Zimbabwe.
First of all, a couple of nuances about its name: it is large and crosses Zimbabwe but it is not a dam: it is the longest known continuous rock intrusion on the planet, according to the Zimbabwe Geological Survey. Or rather, a lopolito. It is 550 kilometers long, between 3 and 13 km wide and protrudes up to 450 meters above the plateaus of the Zimbabwe Craton.
Throughout history, NASA has photographed this geological landmark on several occasions on various missions, mainly through its Earth observation satellites and also by astronauts. Its image is so characteristic that it works as a reference point from space.
Live Science reports that in 1983 astronauts aboard the space shuttle Challenger immortalized it, collecting only the southern part of the structure. In 2000, a 62.2 X 39.2 kilometer section of the Great Dam was captured by the Advanced Space Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) satellite, aboard NASA’s Terra satellite:
NASA/GSFC/MITI/ERSDAC/JAROS, and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team
Zimbabwe’s Great Dam is much more than a geological landmark
If there is an iconic and detailed photograph from space, it is the one from September 30, 2010. It was taken by an astronaut from the Expedition 25 crew of the International Space Station with a Nikon D2Xs camera and a 180 mm lens.
NASA
2.5 billion years ago, molten rock from the Earth’s mantle found cracks in the crust to climb between existing rock layers. As it cooled, it solidified into a mass of truly hard rock: the Great Dam of Zimbabwe. The slowness of this process and the stability of the craton explain why it has survived erosion practically intact for millions of years.
The Great Dam is like a time capsule: That this enormous formation has survived undeterred allows the scientific community to study what the interior of the Earth was like at that time, something that is not possible in most of the planet. And of course, it makes it still visible from space.
As the magma rose and cooled, the minerals separated and concentrated in layers like sediments, leaving large accumulations of platinum, chromite, nickel, vanadium and gold. Because the Great Dam of Zimbabwe also has great strategic and economic importance, as it houses the world’s third largest reserve of platinum and contains other critical minerals for the technology industry.
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Cover | NASA
