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Basement dykes in Panafrican crust, Sinai Peninsula

Tectonic waters

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South Atlantic Lithosphere thickness paper in press

A paper led by Peter Haas (Christian-Albrechts-Uni Kiel, Germany) on modeling the present-day lithosphere thickness along the conjugate South Atlantic margins is accepted and in press for Tectonics.

Key Points:

  • A simple thermal LAB model for the South Atlantic passive margins has been developed
  • The LAB model shows distinct variations along the margins that correlate with margin widths
  • Conjugate margin pairs reflect an asymmetry in LAB depth patterns that are locally related to post break-up lithospheric thinning

Abstract:

The lithospheric architecture of passive margins is crucial for understanding the tectonic processes that caused the break-up of Gondwana. We highlight the evolution of the South Atlantic passive margins by a simple thermal lithosphere-asthenosphere-boundary (LAB) model based on onset and cessation of rifting, crustal thickness, and stretching factors. We simulate lithospheric thinning and select the LAB as the T=1330 °C isotherm, which is calculated by 1D advection and diffusion. Stretching factors and margin geometry are adjusted to state-of-the-art data sets, giving a thermal LAB model that is especially designed for the continental margins of the South Atlantic. Our LAB model shows distinct variations along the passive margins that are not imaged by global LAB models, indicating different rifting mechanisms. For example, we model up to 200 km deep lithosphere in the South American Santos Basin and shallow lithosphere less than 60 km in the Namibe Basin offshore Africa. These two conjugate basins reflect a strong asymmetry in LAB depth that resembles variations in margin width. In a Gondwana reconstruction, we discuss these patterns together with seismic velocity perturbations for the Central and Austral Segments of the margins. The shallow lithosphere in the Namibe Basin correlates with signatures of the Angola Dome, attributed to epeirogenic uplift in the Neogene, suggesting an additional component of post-break up lithospheric thinning.

2022/09/15 10:27 · christian · 0 Comments

Compiling pygplates on WSL Debian

I ran into a strange set of issues when trying to compile pygplates on the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). Despite having all the requirements installed (e.g. Qt5, Boost etc). the compiler complained about Qt5 libraries not being present:

/usr/lib/qt5/bin/uic: error while loading shared libraries: libQt5Core.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

However, these are installed in /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/ like in any other Linux distro. Turns out that some other people have the same issues to load the shared Qt5 libraries when compiling software on WSL. This is solved by running the following line:

sudo strip --remove-section=.note.ABI-tag /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libQt5Core.so.5
2021/09/09 14:21 · christian · 0 Comments

Code.PaleoEarthLabs.org and Sourcehut

I am slowly moving my BitBucket and GitHub repositories to self-hosted Fossil repositories available at https://code.paleoearthlabs.org. This means, there will be public issue trackers, wikis and forums.

Most of them will be mirrored to sourcehut which is a blazingly fast, simple, and FOSS-based alternative to the major players which also comes with mailinglists, todo/issuetracker and a wiki.

My GIT repositories (downstream mirrors of Fossil repos and pure GIT repos) can be found here https://git.sr.ht/~chhei. Note that the Fossil repository mirrors will only receive changes downstream from the original Fossil repos.

The following code is available now:

2021/08/30 08:54 · christian · 0 Comments

National Geographic Front Page

This was the August 2003 front page of the German version of National Geographic - featuring my “Diplomarbeit” (M.Sc. Thesis) after being published through the German "Informationsdienst der Wissenschaften" (IDW) based on an article in the Ruhr-University junior science magazine. The Internet Wayback archive at https://archive.org didn't have a snapshot of the right day.

Copyright with National Geographic

2021/06/05 19:37 · christian

Invited talk at Ciclo de Conferencias: Exploración Offshore - Argentina

I've been honored to present on behalf of Shell at the Instituto Argentina del Petroleo y del Gas' “Ciclo de Conferencias: Exploración Offshore” webinar event on May 27th 2021. The event was attended by about 150 participants.

2021/06/01 22:34 · christian · 0 Comments

Blog Archives

1 Post(s) for August 2016

Exploration tectonics course2016/08/16 16:48Christian Heine