Dr. Derek Keir and PhD student Ryan Gallacher have recently completed a two and a half week seismic deployment around the South of Lake Tanganyika in Tanzania. This work was completed in collaboration with Beach Petroleum (Tanzania) Ltd. and the University of Rochester (USA) with the approval of the Tanzania Petroleum Development Corporation. The project “Kinematics of Rifting in the Southern Tanganyika Rift” aims to improve our understanding of active fault positions along the rift.

A total of 13 seismometers from the SEIS-UK geophysical equipment store were deployed, with 7 instruments along the immediate lakeshore and a further 6 instruments 50-100 km located inland. The instruments used were four 3ESPDs and nine 6TDs. The work consisted of two teams operating simultaneously with one team deploying the lakeshore instruments by boat, while the other team deployed the inland stations by car. A standard deployment involved burying both the seismic instrument and associated cables, with the GPS (used for accurate timing) and solar panel (providing power) remaining above ground.

Future service runs to the region are planned in ~6 months to extract the seismic data and allow work on earthquake relocation and active fault identification to begin.