Zweijahresbericht 2004/2005 - Bibliothek - GFZ

„Inkaba ye Africa“ – dem dynamischen System
Erde auf der Spur
Brian Horsfield 1 , Maarten de Wit 1 sowie weitere Autoren der Inkaba ye Africa Arbeitsgruppe 2
1. Koordinatoren von Inkaba ye Africa: BH – GFZ Potsdam, MW – Universität Kapstadt
2. Südafrika: Ludwig Combrinck, John Compton, Alex Kounov, Justine Tinker, Marian Tredoux
Deutschland: Gabriele Uenzelmann-Neben, Sönke Neben, Karsten Gohl, Wilfried Jokat, Rolf Emmermann, Mioara Mandea, Rolando di Primio, Heinz Wilkes, Oliver
Ritter, Ute Weckmann, Michael Weber, Georg Dresen, Jörg Erzinger, Bob Trumbull, Hedi Oberhänsli
In 2003, the German and South African Earth Science communities embarked on a program to survey a cone-shaped
sector of Earth from core to space, enclosing South Africa and the southern oceans at its surface. The vision is to track
the history of its components back over at least the last 200 million years, to understand Earth system processes and
their interaction at different scales and rates, and along the way to closely scrutinize climate, biodiversity, natural
hazards and resources of Africa. South Africa's geology retains one of the longest best-preserved records of tectonic
movements, magmatic events and climatic change extending back 3.500 million years. The projects in Inkaba ye Africa
are divided between three main research themes, namely Heart of Africa, Margins of Africa, and Living Africa, and
a formal Capacity Building and Outreach Programme is integrated into the programme. Heart of Africa is devoted to
studying the energy transfer from core to space. An important theme here is to address why the geomagnetic field of
South Africa is significantly weaker than over the rest of the Earth at equivalent altitudes and to examine the links
between a deep mantle upwelling and the onland uplift history. Margins of Africa seeks to establish the causes, and
some of the consequences of continental break-up of Southern Africa from its Gondwana configuration. Central to this
research theme are a series of onshore-offshore geophysical transects across three different continental margin types
around southern Africa. Living Africa consists of a number of integrated projects tracking the consequences of continental
margin evolution in southern Africa, namely the ensuing surface and subsurface processes. Here, sedimentation
patterns, changing ocean currents, and the cycling of carbon from the surface down to 5 km are under examination
to provide a dynamic insight into petroleum systems and paleoclimate.
Abb. 1: Inkaba ye Africa – Untersuchung eines kegelförmigen Ausschnitts des Systems Erde, vom Erdkern bis in den
Weltraum
Inkaba ye Africa – Earth System studies in a cone-shaped sector of the Earth from the core to space
Zweijahresbericht 2004/2005 GeoForschungsZentrum Potsdam
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