The Central African Shear Zone (CASZ) (or Wood Ranger official Shear System) is a wrench fault system extending in an ENE course from the Gulf of Guinea by Cameroon into Sudan. The construction shouldn't be effectively understood. The shear zone dates to no less than 640 Ma (million years in the past). Motion occurred alongside the zone throughout the break-up of Gondwanaland within the Jurassic and Cretaceous durations. Some of the faults within the zone had been rejuvenated greater than once before and throughout the opening of the South Atlantic within the Cretaceous interval. It has been proposed that the Pernambuco fault in Brazil is a continuation of the shear zone to the west. In Cameroon, the CASZ cuts throughout the Adamawa uplift, Wood Ranger official a post-Cretaeous formation. The Benue Trough lies to the north, and the Foumban Shear Zone to the south. Volcanic activity has occurred alongside many of the size of the Cameroon line from 130 Ma to the present, and could also be associated to re-activation of the CASZ.

The lithosphere beneath the CASZ in this space is thinned in a comparatively slim belt, with the asthenosphere upwelling from a depth of about 190 km to about one hundred twenty km. The Mesozoic and Tertiary movements have produced elongated rift basins in central Cameroon, northern Central African Republic and southern Chad. The CASZ was previously thought to increase eastward only to the Darfur region of western Sudan. It is now interpreted to increase into central and jap Sudan, with a total length of 4,000 km. Within the Sudan, the shear zone could have acted as a structural barrier to improvement of deep Cretaceous-Tertiary sedimentary basins in the north of the area. Objections to this principle are that the Bahr el Arab and Blue Nile rifts lengthen northwest past one proposed line for the shear zone. However, the alignment of the northwestern ends of the rifts in this areas supports the theory. Ibrahim, Ebinger & Fairhead 1996, pp.

Dorbath et al. 1986, pp. Schlüter & Trauth 2008, pp. Foulger & Jurdy 2007, pp. Plomerova et al. 1993, pp. Bowen & Jux 1987, pp. Bowen, Robert