May 03 2008
The Chyulu hills
his post has absolutely nothing to do wth lions. It is about the place that I live though. And there are lions near the hills.
In 1997 a group of scientists investigated the tomography of the chyulu hills, and wrote a comprehensive paper describing their findings (A tomography study of the Chyulu Hills, Kenya: J. R. R. Ritter and T. Kaspar). If I understand it correctly, there are pockets of magma about 70km underneath the Chyulus, and that these are somehow related to the continued tearing apart of the East african rift. Its not bedtime reading, and for a non-geologically inclined person such as myself there is some language that deserves a special mention in the dungbeetle hall of fame. Such as,
“The major difficulty with teleseismic rays is vertical smearing of structures along the steep ray paths. This can be seen in Fig. 8 where the off-diagonal elements of the resolution matrix are biggest for blocks above and below neighbouring layers.”
I’ve met some nice geologists, but my goodness their work can be obscure in the extreme. Regardless of the difficulty with teleseismic rays, the chyulu hills are pleasant to look at. Most of them are extinct, well eroded cinder cones and have quite a soft, rounded shape with a collapsed crater at the summit. Here is an image of the hills northwest of camp.
