Geoscience students, survey workers and a professor conducted a one-month field project in southern Malawi to better understand the role of pre-existing structures on the architecture of new faults created by rifting.

Participating were students Amy Pritt and Wesley Prater, and associate professor Daniel A. Laó-Dávila, all from the Boone Pickens School of Geology at Oklahoma State University; students Alejandra Santiago Torres and Kevin Vélez Rosado from the department of geology at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez; and colleagues of the Malawi Geological Survey Department and the Malawi University of Science and Technology.

Structural and geological mapping characterized the structures in Precambrian metamorphic rocks close to the rift. Preliminary results of this research will be presented at the American Geophysical Union fall meeting and at the Geological Society of America’s annual meeting at the end of the year. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. II-1358150.d

Dike cutting Precambrian gneiss northeast of the Shire Valley, Malawi

The research team poses in front of the Salambidwe Ring Complex at the boundary between Malawi and Mozambique

Alejandra Santiago Torres, Lois Kamuyango and Amy Pritt measure the orientation of foliation in Precambrian gneiss near Shire Valley, Malawi

A stream flows along mafic dike that cuts Precambrian gneiss northeast of the Shire Valley, Malawi