Review of the Environmental Impact Assessment and Seismic Hazard reports for the Mphanda Nkuwa project, Tete Province, Mozambique Chris J.H Hartnady Umvoto Africa (Pty) Ltd, PO Box 61, Muizenberg, 7950 South Africa Email: chris@umvoto.com
Executive Summary The present-day break-up of the former African plate into Nubian and Somalian plates is expressed over a broad zone of widespread natural seismicity, partly concentrated within a few discrete belts. The extensive seismicity and the graben-and-block zonation of the region around the middle and lower Zambezi River drainage system, reflects a tectonic fragmentation of the Nubian plate into smaller microplates, the motions of which are too slow to be easily resolvable in the present state of geodetic monitoring. The possible slow kinematic development of a separate ‘Tete-Chipata microplate’, bounded by the Malawi and Shire Rift structure (Rovuma plate boundary) on the east, reactivated fracture systems following the Sanangoe Shear Zone (SSZ) on the south, and the Luangwa graben on the northwest, provides the seismotectonic setting for discussion of seismic safety aspects of the Mphanda Nkuwa hydroelectric scheme. The Mphanda Nkuwa dam site is located close to the Chitima-Tchareca Zone (CTZ) of faulting, which follows an older zone of crustal weakness established by the SSZ episode that in turn developed from a zone of oceanic subduction and continental collision between ‘West Gondana’ and ‘South Gondwana’ fragments during supercontinent amalgamation. Reconnaissance morphotectonic assessment of the region around Cahora Bassa and Mphanda Nkuwa indicates that the CTZ and the ‘Estima Fault’ form an en-echelon fault array along the southern boundary of the Tete-Chipata block, probably continuously connected at depth to the main SSZ dislocation within the upper-crustal seismogenic layer. The eastern (‘F1’) segment of the Estima Fault is a recent surface-breaking fault scarp with elements of both normal faulting (southerly downthrow of a few metres) and right-lateral strike-slip faulting (ridge offsets of transacted drainage divides). The combined Estima-TCZ array therefore constitutes a major hazard to the seismic safety of both the Cahora Bassa and proposed Mphanda Nkuwa dams, should future rupture propagate across different segments of the active en-echelon array. Considering this broader seismotectonic setting, the current determination of a ‘Maximum Credible Earthquake’ (MCE) of moment magnitude (Mw) 6.4 is not realistic. The eastern part of the CTZ, the Chitima fault with a length of ~90 km, is potentially capable of generating a Mw~7.5 earthquake at a distance of only a few kilometres from the Mphanda Nkuwa site. This finding has implications for the planned Design Phase of the Mphanda Nkuwa dam, a future episode of reservoir-triggered seismicity (RTS) related to Mphanda Nkuwa reservoir impoundment, and geophysical invetigations required to ensure the continued safety of the Cahora Bassa dam structure.
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