Journal article
Birth of the East African Rift System: Nucleation of magmatism and strain in the Turkana Depression
SC Boone, BP Kohn, AJW Gleadow, CK Morley, C Seiler, DA Foster
Geology | GEOLOGICAL SOC AMER, INC | Published : 2019
DOI: 10.1130/G46468.1
Abstract
The Turkana Depression of northern Kenya and southern Ethiopia contains voluminous plume-related basalts that mark the onset of the Paleogene-recent East African Rift System (EARS) at ca. 45 Ma. Thus, the Turkana Depression is crucial to understanding the inception of intracontinental rifting. However, the precise chronology of early rift-basin formation in Turkana is poorly constrained. We present apatite fission-track and (U-Th-Sm)/He thermochronology data from basement rocks from the margins of the north-south-trending Lokichar Basin that constrain the onset of rift-related cooling. Thermal history modeling of these data documents pronounced Eocene to Miocene denudational cooling of the b..
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Awarded by Australian Research Council
Funding Acknowledgements
This study was supported by an Australian Research Council grant (DP130101610). Additional infrastructure support for the University of Melbourne (Australia) Thermochronology Laboratory comes from the AuScope program of the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy. Fieldwork benefited from the hospitality of Richard Leakey, Meave Leakey, and the Turkana Basin Institute, and the assistance of Francis Ekai, Moses Loparakuo Lenina, and Syrina van der Kamp. Technical assistance was provided by Abaz Alimanovic for (U-Th-Sm)/He analyses and Graham Hutchinson for electron microprobe analyses. Informative discussions and suggestions were contributed by Mike Sandiford and Maxwell Lechte. We would also like to thank Peter van der Beek and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive reviews.