A GEOLOGICAL EXCURSION TO THE MESOZOIC SEDIMENTS OF THE ABAY BASIN (BLUE NILE), RECENT VOLCANICS OF THE ETHIOPIAN MAIN RIFT AND BASEMENT ROCKS OF THE ADOLA REA, ETHIOPIA

The field excursion to Ethiopia took place from April 5 to 22, 2001. Ethiopia has a varied geo-logy and spectacular topography with the major East African Rift cutting its plateau into twohalves. The areas visited are i) the Blue Nile Gorge (the river Abay Gorge as locally known)containing a complete stratigraphy of the Ethiopian geology starting with a Precambrian rockunit at the base overlain by a thick sequence of Mesozoic sediments capped by the Tertiary trapbasalts making up the Ethiopian plateau; ii) the Main Ethiopia Rift containing a number of lakesand geothermal fields and iii) the Adola gold belt including the Kenticha tantalum-bearingpegmatites (Fig. 1). Nine earth science students (7 from the University of Graz and 2 from theMining University of Leoben) took part in this excursion. The nine students were divided intothree groups. The first group (K. Krenn, B. Kosednar and T. Egger) was responsible for the reporton the Blue Nile gorge and the road geology from Addis Ababa towards the Ethiopian Rift; thesecond group (U. Koch, B. Goritschnig and L. Ofner) wrote the report on the Ethiopian rift andthe third group (J. Schaflechner, H. Pichler and D. Bauernfeind) was responsible for the reporton the Adola belt and the Kenticha pegmatites. A geological excursion guide was compiled byDr. Solomon Taddesse of the Addis Ababa University which was used during the excursion. Thepresent report is compiled and edited by A. Mogessie using the student reports, the excursionguide and literature data.