Author(s)

Boris Chako Tchamabé^1*, Takeshi Ohba¹, Issa  ¹, Seigo Ooki¹, Dieudonné Youmen², Sebastien Owona², Gregory Tanyileke³, Joseph Victor Hell³

¹Laboratory of Volcanology and Geochemistry, Department of Chemistry, Tokai University, Tokyo, Japan.
²Department of Earth Science, Faculty of Sciences, University of Douala, Douala, Cameroon.
³Institute of Mining and Geological Research (IRGM), Yaoundé, Cameroon.

The Barombi Mbo Maar (BMM), which is the largest maar in Cameroon, possesses about 126 m-thick well-preserved pyroclastic deposits sequence in which two successive paleosoil beds have been identified. The maar was thought to have been active a million years ago. However, layers stratigraphically separated by the identified paleosoils have been dated to shed lights on its age and to reconstruct the chronology of its past activity. The results showed that the BMM formed through three eruptive cycles: the first ~0.51 Ma ago, the second at ~0.2 Ma and the third ~0.08 Ma B.P. The ages indicate that the BMM maar-forming eruptions were younger than a million years. The findings also suggested that the maar is polygenetic. At a regional scale, the eruptive events would have occurred during some volcanic manifestations at Mt Manengouba and Mt Cameroon. Therefore, with the decrease in the recurrence time of eruptions from ~0.3 Ma to 0.1 Ma, and given the possible relation between its eruptive events and those of its neighboring polygenetic volcanoes, the BMM is expected to erupt within the next 20 ka.

Maar, Eruptive Episodes, Barombi Mbo, Cameroon

Tchamabé, B. , Ohba, T. ,  , I. , Ooki, S. , Youmen, D. , Owona, S. , Tanyileke, G. and Hell, J. (2014) Temporal Evolution of the Barombi Mbo Maar, a Polygenetic Maar-Diatreme Volcano of the Cameroon Volcanic Line. International Journal of Geosciences, 5, 1315-1323. doi: 10.4236/ijg.2014.511108.