According to Picktrue.com, Democratic Republic of the Congo is a Central African State ; from 1971 to 1997 officially called Zaire. It borders to the North with the Central African Republic and South Sudan, to the NE with Uganda, to the East with Rwanda, Burundi and Tanzania, to the SE with Zambia, to the South with Zambia and Angola, to the West with the Republic of the Congo (and for a short distance it overlooks the Atlantic Ocean).
The morphology of Democratic Republic of the Congo is rather uniform. Most of the territory is an immense basin with a sub-horizontal bottom, generally below 500 m asl, inclined towards the West, interrupted by a series of sloping terraces (which correspond to waterfalls on the waterways), most of the time parallel to the coast. The depression is bordered and circumscribed by reliefs that affect the Congolese territory only in the sections where the border follows the watershed, that is to say at the eastern end, where the volcanic alignments along the Rift Valley reach considerable elevations, culminating at 5109 m with the top of Ruvenzori. There is also the Nyiragongo (3470 m), the most active volcanic system in Africa, within the Virunga National Park. Other reliefs, of much more modest proportions, marginal and often tabular, rise to the North between the courses of Ubangi and Congo and to the extreme S, between those of Luapula-Luvua and Lualaba (Monte Mulumbe), in Kasai and in western Katanga, where they take the form of plateaus.
The Congo basin, made up largely of sediments of the Mesozoic and Quaternary age, structurally constitutes a craton, that is a rigid and stable zone of the earth’s crust, surrounded by orogens, plastic and unstable orogenic bands, sites of corrugations. Of these bands, the most evident, at the eastern edge of the basin, is the central section of the East African Rift Valley system, an alignment of fractures in the earth’s crust from the Miocene-Pleistocene age, still the site of intense seismic activity today. and volcanic. AS the Congolese basin is delimited by the Katanga orogen, which is interposed, with an EW course, between the cratons of the Congo and the Kalahari: active in the late Precambrian, it has the appearance of a tabular relief formed by a thick succession of shallow water sediments, and contains large metamorphosed cupriferous deposits in varying degrees. Finally, on the western side, the Congo basin is flanked by the orogenic belt of the western Democratic Republic of the Congo, not well defined, with a course parallel to the Atlantic coast.
The dense equatorial forest is the dominant form of vegetation in the vast basin that forms the central part of the basin; it now covers only just over 50% of the country, following uncontrolled deforestation. The N and S watershed zones of the equatorial forest are covered by savannas, giving way to steppes in the sandy zones. The sparse forest dominates the highlands of Katanga, in the southeastern part of the country. The eastern lakes region includes some protected natural areas, of which five have been declared ‘common heritage of humanity’ by UNESCO: their protection has been severely compromised by the civil war and conflicts in the neighboring states of Rwanda and Burundi.
The position, straddling the equator, and the homogeneity of the territory mean that the climatic conditions are almost exclusively dictated by the distance from the latitude and the altitude. Typically equatorial, therefore, the climate records high average temperatures, with very low annual excursions (22-26 ° C), abundant rainfall (1700-1800 mm), relative humidity rates of the order of 75-85%; seasonality becomes sensitive the further one proceeds to the North and S of the equator, with the presence of relatively more or less rainy periods; temperature and humidity are mitigated by the altitude and take on moderate values, in particular on the eastern hills and on the southern plateaus, areas of choice for the white settlement in the colonial age and for plantation crops.
