Kalahari Desert has too dense a ground cover. The main region that lacks ground cover is in the southwest Kalahari (southeast of Namibia, northwest of South Africa and southwest of Botswana) in the south of the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park. For instance in the ZF Mgcawu District Municipality of South Africa, total vegetation cover may be as low as 30.72% on non-protected (from cattle grazing) farmlands south of Twee Rivieren Rest Camp and 37.74% in the protected (from cattle grazing) South African side of the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park : these southernmost Kalahari xeric savanna areas are truly semi-deserts. However, in all the remaining
Kalahari Craton Archaean-Palaeoproterozoic core of the craton is called the Proto-Kalahari Craton. This core plus accreted Mesoproterozoic crust and dispersed non-African fragments compose the Kalahari Craton. Before the Pan-African Orogeny, the Kalahari Craton was much larger than it is today, but its sutures and therefore its extent are difficult to locate due to later overprinting. The Kaapvaal Craton, Zimbabwe Craton, and Limpopo Belt are made of Archaean terranes and contain crust at least 3.2 and are underlain by a thick () layer of buoyant mantle that is producing garnets and diamonds. During the Palaeoproterozoic the northwest margin of the Archaean core grew