Two students from the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez, and two students and one faculty from the Boone Pickens School of Geology at Oklahoma State University, along with colleagues of the Malawi Geological Survey Department and Malawi University of Science and Technology, conducted a 1 month fieldwork in southern Malawi to better understand the role of pre-existing structures on the architecture of new faults created by rifting. Structural and geological mapping in the northern escarpment of the Shire Valley, was conducted to determine if current extension was being accommodated along the faults of the Jurassic Rift. In addition, the contacts between border faults and the ring complexes in the Zomba area were characterized to determine if the occurrence of the intrusions had an effect on the orientation of the faults. Preliminary results of this research will be presented in the Geological Society of America Annual Meeting and Exposition in Denver, Colorado and in the American Geophysical Union Meeting in San Francisco at the end of the year.
We are excited about our experiences in Malawi and look forward to our visit next year where we will extend our research to central Malawi.
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. II-1358150.
