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Red Sea
Van der Beek et al. (1994) compare the Transantarctic Mountains (TAM) to the Saudi Arabian Red Sea margin in the context of their model of lithospheric thinning as a mechanism for rift shoulder uplift. The Red Sea rift flank mountains have a lower average elevation than the TAM, and the basins in the Red Sea are filled with less sediment than the Victoria Land Basin. Van der Beek et al. (1994) find that a pure shear mechanism for thinning the lithosphere is necessary beneath the Red Sea margin, in contrast to the simple shear required beneath the TAM.
Great Escarpment of Southern Africa
Ten Brink and Stern (1992) compare the TAM to the Great Escarpment of Southern Africa in the context of their model for the uplift of rift shoulders. A map of the Great Escarpment is shown in Figure 36.
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| Figure 36. Map of the Great Escarpment in Southern Africa. Shaded region shows the geographical extent of post-Karoo sediments in the Kalahari Basin. ten Brink and Stern, 1992. | |||
The Great Escarpment has a lower average elevation than the TAM, though this may be due to post-rifting erosion and escarpment retreat. The highest elevations in the Great Escarpment occur 50-300 km inland from the coast, in contrast to the TAM where the highest elevations typically occur within 50 km of the coast. Like the TAM, the Great Escarpment system includes a hinterland basin, the Kalahari Basin (Figure 36). Ten Brink and Stern (1992) model the Kalahari Basin as a flexural basin created by the load of the Great Escarpment. They also model the Great Escarpment using a continuous elastic plate (Figure 37), not the broken plate required for the TAM.
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| Figure 37. Diagrams of models using (top) a continuous elastic plate for the Great Escarpment of Southern Africa, and (bottom) a broken elastic plate for the TAM. ten Brink and Stern, 1992. | ||||