Tepui

Tepuis are flat table-top mountains or mesa found in the Guyana Highlands of South America, especially in Venezuela. In the language of the Pemon people who live in the Gran Savana, Tepui means ‘House of the Gods’ due to their height

Researchers think tepuis started forming when sand settled and became rock at the bottom of the ancient oceans, some 2 billion years ago. To put that into perspective, Mount Everest only formed about 60 million years ago, and Earth itself is roughly 4.5 billion years old..

The Guayana Shield, on which the Tepuis rest, consists of a rock basement with a variety of igneous and metamorphic rock types formed during different geological periods beginning 1.8 billion years ago. Most of this granitic basement was overlain with many layers of sand that were subsequently compressed and cemented together to a thickness of several thousand meters to form quartzitic and sandstone rocks.