The geology of Mozambique is primarily extremely old Precambrian metamorphic and igneous crystalline basement rock, formed in the Archean and Proterozoic, in some cases more than two billion years ago.
As a result of its complex and ancient geology, Mozambique has deposits of iron, coal, gold, mineral sands, bauxite, copper and other natural resources.
Over two billion years old, these rocks date to the Archean and Paleoproterozoic and are an extension of greenstone belts and granite-gneisses, within the Zimbabwe Craton.
The Snowball Earth global glaciation event 600 million years ago, at the same time as the orogeny began, left glacial sedimentary rocks in the Katangula Group in northwestern Mozambique, which is the same unit as the Katanga Supergroup in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zambia.
The Karoo Supergroup, the most widely dispersed stratigraphic unit in southern Africa formed from the Carboniferous through the Early Jurassic in the Mesozoic.
A 30 kilometer wide belt of dune sands occupies the southern coast of the country, atop Cretaceous and Paleogene rocks and form a moderately productive unconfined aquifer.
The Rovuma Basin is poorly studied, but impermeable marl and high incidences of brackish groundwater suggest it would not be a major potential source.
The country has 120 to 380 million tons of coal reserves in the bottom units of the Karoo Supergroup in the Rio Lunho Basin.
The Cretaceous Grudja Formation in shows the most promise for potential hydrocarbons and Mesozoic sedimentary sequences in the north and south both have the possibility of future discoveries.