Botswana

Botswana was long considered one of the quieter seismic environments in southern Africa, but this perception changed dramatically on 3 April 2017, when a [[magnitude]] 6.5 earthquake struck near the town of Moiyabana in the central-eastern part of the country. The earthquake was the largest instrumentally recorded event in Botswana's history and was felt across southern Africa from Zimbabwe to South Africa. It caused widespread concern in Gaborone and cracked buildings across central Botswana, though casualties were limited. Its [[epicenter]] was located in a previously underappreciated zone of intraplate deformation.

The primary seismogenic structure in Botswana is the Okavango Rift Zone in the northwest, which represents the southernmost propagating arm of the East African Rift System. The Okavango Rift is young and embryonic — currently in an early stage of continental rifting — and is expressed at the surface by the Okavango Delta, the world's largest inland river delta, which occupies a structural depression created by rift-related subsidence. The major [[fault]]s bounding the Okavango Rift trend northeast-southwest and dip inward toward the rift axis. Periodic earthquakes along these faults indicate that extension is actively occurring.

Instrumentally recorded seismicity in Botswana includes numerous events in the magnitude 3.0 to 5.5 range concentrated along the Okavango Rift, as well as scattered events in the central and eastern parts of the country on ancient basement structures. Before the 2017 event, the largest known earthquake in Botswana was a magnitude 6.2 event in 1952 also associated with the rift zone.

The [[seismic-wave]] characteristics of earthquakes in Botswana reflect the mixed tectonic environment: rift-related events show normal-faulting focal mechanisms consistent with east-west extension, while intraplate events on reactivated basement structures show more varied mechanisms. Botswana's deep geology is dominated by the Kaapvaal craton to the south and east — one of the world's oldest cratons, formed 3.1 to 3.7 billion years ago — and the Limpopo Belt along the border with South Africa. The Okavango Rift cuts through younger mobile belt rocks to the northwest, exploiting pre-existing zones of weakness. Seismic hazard in Botswana is moderate in the northwest and low-to-very-low elsewhere.