The Kibara Mountains (French: Monts Kibara) are a range in the

Katanga Province Katanga was one of the four large provinces created in the Belgian Congo in 1914. It was one of the eleven provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo between 1966 and 2015, when it was split into the Tanganyika, Haut-Lomami, Lualaba, ...

of the

Democratic Republic of the Congo The Democratic Republic of the Congo (french: République démocratique du Congo (RDC), colloquially "La RDC" ), informally Congo-Kinshasa, DR Congo, the DRC, the DROC, or the Congo, and formerly and also colloquially Zaire, is a country in ...

. They are partly within the

Upemba National Park Upemba National Park is a large national park in Haut-Lomami, Lualaba Province & Haut-Katanga Province (formerly in Katanga Province) of the southeastern Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly Zaire. Geography At the time of the creation of Upem ...

. The Kibara mountains were once part of a continuous plateau in northern Katanga that also included the Mitumba and Kundelungu blocks, and has now been divided by deep valleys. The Upemba depression lies to the west of the Kibara mountains. The

Lufira River The Lufira River is a tributary of the Lualaba River in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The Lufira rises in the Shaba plateau south of Likasi. The river was dammed in 1926 at Mwadingusha near Likasi to form Lake Tshangalele, a rese ...

separates them from the Mitumba Mountains to the east. The Kibara mountains have an average elevation of above sea level and a highest elevation of . Above the soil is generally poor, sandy and partly lateritized, and becomes very dry in the dry season. Vegetation is low grassland or steppe. There are few trees or bushes. The mountains have a NE-SW trend, and are folded and intruded. They have been strongly uplifted. The fragmented surface from the end of the

Cretaceous The Cretaceous ( ) is a geological period that lasted from about 145 to 66 million years ago (Mya). It is the third and final period of the Mesozoic Era, as well as the longest. At around 79 million years, it is the longest geological period of ...

at Lumbele occurs at an elevation of , above the Mid-

Cenozoic The Cenozoic ( ; ) is Earth's current geological era, representing the last 66million years of Earth's history. It is characterised by the dominance of mammals, birds and flowering plants, a cooling and drying climate, and the current configu ...

pediplain at Mkana at an elevation of . The mountains give their name to the

Kibaran orogeny The Kibaran orogeny is a term that has been used for a series of orogenic events, in what is now Africa, that began in the Mesoproterozoic, around 1400 Ma and continued until around 1000 Ma when the supercontinent Rodinia was assembled. The term " ...

. In 1931 Robert studied the mountains and introduced the terms "Complexe des Kibara" and "Système des Kibara" to describe his theory of their origins, a mountain-building process that followed a

geosyncline A geosyncline (originally called a geosynclinal) is an obsolete geological concept to explain orogens, which was developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, before the theory of plate tectonics was envisaged. Şengör (1982), p. 11 A geo ...

episode.

References

;Sources * * {{refend Mountain ranges of the Democratic Republic of the Congo Haut-Katanga Province Haut-Lomami