The Central African Shear Zone (CASZ) (or Shear System) is a wrench fault system extending in an ENE direction from the Gulf of Guinea by means of Cameroon into Sudan. The structure shouldn't be nicely understood. The shear zone dates to at least 640 Ma (million years in the past). Motion occurred along the zone in the course of the break-up of Gondwanaland within the Jurassic and Wood Ranger Power Shears website Cretaceous durations. Among the faults within the zone had been rejuvenated greater than as soon as before and through the opening of the South Atlantic within the Cretaceous period. It has been proposed that the Pernambuco fault in Brazil is a continuation of the shear zone to the west. In Cameroon, the CASZ cuts throughout the Adamawa uplift, a post-Cretaeous formation. The Benue Trough lies to the north, and the Foumban Shear Zone to the south. Volcanic activity has occurred along many of the size of the Cameroon line from 130 Ma to the present, and could also be associated to re-activation of the CASZ.
The lithosphere beneath the CASZ on this area is thinned in a relatively slim belt, with the asthenosphere upwelling from a depth of about 190 km to about one hundred twenty km. The Mesozoic and Tertiary movements have produced elongated rift basins in central Cameroon, northern Central African Republic and southern Chad. The CASZ was formerly thought to extend eastward solely to the Darfur region of western Sudan. It is now interpreted to extend into central and eastern Sudan, with a total size of 4,000 km. In the Sudan, the shear zone could have acted as a structural barrier to improvement of deep Cretaceous-Tertiary sedimentary basins within the north of the area. Objections to this theory are that the Bahr el Arab and Blue Nile rifts prolong northwest past one proposed line for the shear zone. However, the alignment of the northwestern ends of the rifts in this areas helps the idea. Ibrahim, Ebinger & Fairhead 1996, pp.
Dorbath et al. 1986, pp. Schlüter & Trauth 2008, pp. Foulger & Jurdy 2007, pp. Plomerova et al. 1993, pp. Bowen & Jux 1987, pp. Bowen, Robert