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Site Map / Index This page last modified: 8th January, 2008 ŠPaul Markwick 2000-2008 |
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Markwick, P.J., M.C. Raddadi, R.J. Hoult, K.L. Wilson, and J.D. Fairhead (2007) The evolution of the African landscape during the Mesozoic and Cenozoic: integrating high resolution palaeogeography, drainage analysis and landscape dynamics 6th PESGB-HGS Africa Conference, September 11-13, 2007, Cape Town, South Africa. Abstract The evolution of the African landscape (palaeogeography) through the Mesozoic and Cenozoic played a major role in dictating the nature of the lithofacies preserved in downstream depositional basins. Reconstructing this changing landscape is therefore an important part of any exploration strategy. We have generated GIS-based palaeogeographic interpretations for Africa for a series of time-slices through the last 300 million years of Earth History. These maps include the following: a structural and tectonic framework based on a survey of available potential field data, plate kinematic modelling and public domain structural interpretations and seismic; palaeoenvironmental, lithological and other geological data (e.g. outcrop, subcrop and climate proxies); models of palaeotopography and palaeobathymetric; palaeodrainage reconstructions, including the distribution of the principal palaeo-rivers, outfall points, and drainage basin geometries; rotated distribution of political and hydrocarbon data (e.g. wells and fields); palaeo-digital elevation model, which represents a gridded representation of our preferred hypothesis for the landscape of each time-slice. Such robust mapping provides the basis for additional stratigraphic modelling, as well facilitating a better understanding of lithofacies distributions in time and space. In this presentation we will show examples of some of the methodologies used to generate the maps (including the landscape and drainage analysis of the modern), images of different stages in map generation, and focussed 3-D views of pertinent palaeogeomorphological features for a Late Cretaceous example in order to demonstrate the value of such robust palaeogeographic reconstructions for exploration. |
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