The Cenozoic East African rift (EAR), Cameroon Volcanic Line (CVL), and Atlas Mountains formed on the slow‐moving African continent, which last experienced orogeny during the Pan‐African. We synthesize primarily geophysical data to evaluate the role of magmatism in shaping Africa's crust. In young magmatic rift zones, melt and volatiles migrate from the asthenosphere to gas‐rich magma reservoirs at the Moho, altering crustal composition and reducing strength. Within the southernmost Eastern rift, the crust comprises ~20% new magmatic material ponded in the lower crust and intruded as sills and dikes at shallower depths. In the Main Ethiopian Rift, intrusions comprise 30% of the crust below axial zones of dike‐dominated extension. In the incipient rupture zones of the Afar rift, magma intrusions fed from crustal magma chambers beneath segment centers create new columns of mafic crust, as along slow‐spreading ridges. Our comparisons suggest that transitional crust, including seaward dipping sequences, is created as progressively smaller screens of continental crust are heated and weakened by magma intrusion into 15–20 km thick crust. In the 30 Ma Recent CVL, which lacks a hot spot age progression, extensional forces are small, inhibiting the creation and rise of magma into the crust. In the Atlas orogen, localized magmatism follows the strike of the Atlas Mountains from the Canary Islands hot spot toward the Alboran Sea. CVL and Atlas magmatism has had minimal impact on crustal structure. Our syntheses show that magma and volatiles are migrating from the asthenosphere through the plates, modifying rheology, and contributing significantly to global carbon and water fluxes.

Sub-Saharan social-ecological systems are undergoing changes in environmental conditions, including modifications in rainfall pattern and biodiversity loss. Consequences of such changes depend on complex causal chains which call for integrated management strategies whose efficiency could benefit from ecosystem dynamic modeling. However, ecosystem models often require lots of quantitative information for estimating parameters, which is often unavailable. Alternatively, qualitative modeling frameworks have proved useful for explaining ecosystem responses to perturbations, while only requiring qualitative information about social-ecological interactions and events and providing more general predictions due to their validity for wide ranges of parameter values. In this paper, we propose the Ecological Discrete-Event Network (EDEN), an innovative qualitative dynamic modeling framework based on “if-then” rules generating non-deterministic dynamics. Based on expert knowledge, observations, and literature, we use EDEN to assess the effect of permanent changes in surface water and herbivores diversity on vegetation and socio-economic transitions in an East African savanna. Results show that water availability drives changes in vegetation and socio-economic transitions, while herbivore functional groups have highly contrasted effects depending on the group. This first use of EDEN in a savanna context is promising for bridging expert knowledge and ecosystem modeling.

Continental break-up is controlled by several parameters and processes (rheology, inherited structures, magmatism, etc). Their impact, chronology and interactions are still poorly known and debated, particularly when rifting interacts with cratons. In order to better understand the rifting initiation in a cratonic lithosphere, we analysed 22 magnetotelluric (MT) soundings collected along two East-West profiles in two different rift segments of the North Tanzanian Divergence. The North Tanzanian Divergence, where the East African Rift is at its earliest stage, is a remarkable example of the transition between magmatic to amagmatic rifting with two clearly identified segments. Only separated by a hundred kilometers, these segments, Natron (North) and Manyara (South), display contrasted morphological (wide versus narrow), volcanic (many versus a few edifices) and seismic (shallow versus deep activity) signatures. Magnetotelluric profiles across the two segments were inverted with a three-dimensional approach and supplied the resistive structure of the upper lithosphere (down to about 70 km). The Natron segment has a rather conductive lithosphere containing several resistive features (Proterozoic Belt), whereas the Manyara segment displays highly resistive blocks probably of cratonic nature encompassing a conductive structure under the axial valley. The joint interpretation of these models with recent local and regional seismological studies highlights totally different structures and processes involved in the two segments of the North Tanzanian Divergence. We identified contrasted CO₂ content, magma upwelling or trapping, in depth regarding the Manyara or the Natron branch and the influence of inherited cratonic structures in the rifting dynamics.

SUMMARY: While local earthquake tomography is typically used to image the crust, this technique has restricted depth penetration due to short receiver-source distances. Regional tomography however aims to image the upper mantle from teleseismic events but suffers from poor resolution from 0 down to 40 km depth. We present here a hybrid method that combines the two approaches taking advantage of the short-wavelength resolution within the crust to better constrain the ray path at depth, and thus to improve the lithospheric imaging. Using this new method enhances the continuity or disruption of mantle anomalies towards the surface. Such hybrid tomographic images of crust-to-upper mantle structures are then critical to understand the relation and interplay between the thermal and mechanical lithospheric processes and the role in the localization of the deformation at the surface. We apply our approach to the North Tanzanian Divergence (NTD), where those processes interact with a cold cratonic lithosphere. Our new tomographic images clearly demonstrate the impact of deep-seated processes on surface features. First, strong lateral velocity anomalies and clustered seismicity in the crust are consistent with the surface geology of the NTD (rifted basins, volcanoes and border faults). Then, at a lithospheric scale, the velocity distribution highlights the major role of inherited structures in guiding the rift opening. In particular, our study suggests a strong influence of the Masai cratonic block, south of the NTD, in the rift evolution. The transition from the north–south axial valley into three diverging rift arms (Eyasi, Natron-Manyara and Pangani) is likely due to the change in rheology and to the presence of magma along inherited sutures between the craton and the mobile belts.

The emergence of high resolution satellite measurements of the gravitational field (GOCE mission) offers promising perspectives for the study of the Earth’s interior. These new data call for the development of innovant analysis and interpretation methods. Here we combine a forward prism computation with a Bayesian resolution approach to invert for these gravity gradient data configuration. We apply and test our new method on satellite data configuration, that is 225 km height with a global and homogeneous geographic distribution. We first quantify the resolution of our method according to both data and parametrization characteristics. It appears that for reasonable density contrast values (0.1 g cm⁻³) crustal structures have to be wider than ∼28 km to be detectable in the GOCE signal. Deeper bodies are distinguishable for greater size (35 km size at 50 km depth, ∼80 km at 300 km depth). We invert the six tensor components, among which five are independent. By carefully testing each of them and their different combinations, we enlighten a trade off between the recovery of data and the sensitivity to inversion parameters. We particularly discussed this characteristic in terms of geometry of the synthetic model tested (structures orientation, 3-D geometry, etc.). In terms of RMS value, each component is always better explained if inverted solely, but the result is strongly affected by the inversion parametrization (smoothing, variances, etc.). On the contrary, the simultaneous inversion of several components displays a significant improvement for the global tensor recovery, more dependent on data than on density variance or on smoothness control. Comparing gravity and gradient inversions, we highlight the superiority of the GG data to better reproduce the structures especially in terms of vertical location. We successfully test our method on a realistic case of a complex subduction case for both gradient and gravity data. While the imaging of small crustal structures requires terrestrial gravity data set, the longest wavelength of the slab is well recovered with both data sets. The precision and homogeneous coverage of GOCE data however, counterbalance the heterogeneous and often quite non-existence coverage of terrestrial gravity data. This is particularly true in large areas which requires a coherent assemblage of heterogeneous data sets, or in high relief, vegetally covered and offshore zones.