Abstract
The Lake Victoria Basin is situated between the Eastern and Western Branches of the East African Rift System (EARS), at the juncture of Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. It covers the northern section of the Tanzanian Craton and parts of the surrounding mobile belts which overlap the edges of the craton. The area of the basin has been a locus of deposition since the Precambrian, although the basin has probably assumed various configurations since that time. The presence of Precambrian through Tertiary volcanic sequences in the Western Branch of the EARS suggests several episodes of doming in the Western Branch and subsequent “pondings” of the Lake Victoria Basin. Precambrian, Lower Karroo (Ecca-age), and Tertiary sediments surround, and continue under, the present Lake Victoria. The predominant controls on the formation of the Lake Victoria Basin are tectonic uplift with associated rifting around the craton margins, and intersection among a series of NW-trending strike-slip faults which transect the craton. Casual observation might suggest that the basin was formed by meteorite impact (Saul and Glaholm, 1981), but there is no geologic evidence (i.e., impact breccias, tektites, radial fracture systems) to support this proposition.
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© 1992 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Rach, N.M. (1992). Tectonic Controls on the Lake Victoria Basin. In: Mason, R. (eds) Basement Tectonics 7. Proceedings of the International Conferences on Basement Tectonics, vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0833-3_16
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0833-3_16
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