Graduation Year
2015
Document Type
Thesis
Degree
M.S.
Degree Name
Master of Science (M.S.)
Degree Granting Department
Geology
Major Professor
Rocco Malservisi, Ph.D.
Committee Member
Timothy Dixon, Ph.D.
Committee Member
Urs Hugentobler, Ph.D.
Keywords
Euler vectors, Reference frame, Rate residual, Internal deformation
Abstract
The Nubia plate is normally considered to be a rigid plate and as such used in the realization of terrestrial reference frame. Gondwana breakup plate reconstruction, the Cameroon volcanic line, seismicity, and the morphology of the Okavango rift zone (ORZ) suggest the presence of internal deformation within the Nubia plate. To test this hypothesis, six different reference frames were developed from the velocity field of three individual regions (West, Central and South), and of different combinations of them (West+Central, South+Central, and Nubia as a whole). The residual velocities with respect to these references frame help us understand the presence of the relative motion between the different regions thus the stability of the plate.
To realize the reference frames, all the publicly available global positioning system (GPS) data within the “stable” Nubia plate was processed. Given the small relative velocity, it is important to eliminate eventual biases in the analysis and to have good estimates of uncertainty of the observed velocities. For this reason, velocities were analyzed, and rate uncertainties computed using the Allan variance of rate (AVR) technique, accounting for colored noise.
Although geological and geophysical studies indicate the possibility of internal deformation within Nubia, the results of this study shows that the current GPS network is not capable to identify intraplate deformation and within uncertainties Nubia is a single plate. As final note, both the color of the noise and the amplitude of the annual signal of each time series as function of latitude and climatic region were analyzed. The study shows that the noise is approximately flicker for all the good stations independently of the location. On the contrary, the amplitude of the annual signal is strongly dependent on the climate of the regions.
Scholar Commons Citation
Njoroge, Mary Wambui, "Is Nubia Plate Rigid? A Geodetic Study of the Relative Motion of Different Cratonic Areas within Africa." (2015). USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations.
https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/etd/6003
