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Phoenix666 [soylentnews.org] writes:

Researchers in the College of Arts and Sciences have published new details about the evolution of the East African Rift (EAR) Valley [phys.org], one of the world's largest continental rift zones.

Christopher Scholz, professor of Earth sciences, and a team of students and research staff, have spent the past year processing and analyzing data acquired in 2015 from Lake Malawi, the result of a multinational research effort sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF). By studying the interplay of sedimentation and tectonics, they have confirmed that rifting—the process by which the Earth's tectonic plates move apart—has occurred slowly in the lake's central basin over the past 1.3 million years, utilizing a series of faults many millions of years older.

Scholz says the nature of the tectonic activity is attributed to a strong, cold lithosphere and to strain localization on faults that occurred millions of years earlier, when the basin formed. The Earth's lithosphere includes the crust and uppermost mantle.

The team's findings are the subject of an article in the Journal of Structural Geology (Elsevier, 2016), which Scholz co-authored with lead author and Ph.D. candidate Tannis McCartney G'17.

"We collected data during a month-long research cruise aboard a converted container ship on Lake Malawi," says Scholz, a leader in sedimentary basin analysis of extensional systems. "For the first time, a crustal-scale seismic source was deployed on an African lake, revealing tantalizing, new details about the stratigraphic and structural evolution of the East African Rift System."

Can geology be a real science when their experiments aren't reproducible and their theories aren't falsifiable?

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