Geologists have confirmed that Africa is splitting in two, which is making a new ocean. A 35-mile-long rift appeared in the Ethiopian deserts of the Far region in 2005, and an international effort has shown that it is probably the start of a new sea.
The new study, which was published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, uses seismic data from the rift to show that it is caused by processes similar to those at the bottom of the ocean. In the desert, the tectonic plates of Africa and Arabia meet and have been slowly moving apart for about 30 million years. The same movement has also caused the Red Sea to split, but it only does so at a rate of a few millimeters per year.
Kenya Broadcasting Cooperation (KBC) says that many people are shocked by the idea that a new ocean could form in Africa. Dr. Edwin Dindi of the University of Nairobi’s Department of Geology in the Faculty of Science and Technology says that it is possible that an ocean is forming along the eastern arm of the African Rift Valley.
“The Eastern arm of the Rift Valley is pretty active, as shown by the many tremors that happen around it,” he says. “However, it will take a long time, probably millions of years, for this to happen.”
Geologists think that Earth was made about 4.5 billion years ago. After the continental crust formed 3.2 billion years ago, the continental shelf started to form when the melting rocks below the earth’s surface pushed through the columns and onto the earth, forming the supercontinent.
In an interview with the Department of Geology, Dindi said that the tectonic plates are always changing. Some move against each other along fault zones, some fall under each other, and others crash into each other and tear apart at divergent plate boundaries. This movement caused Africa, South America, North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia to form the way they are today.
Dindi says that the constant movement of the continental crust led to the formation of the East African Rift Valley. This valley is still active and getting bigger, which could lead to a new ocean forming in Africa.
“But this won’t happen right away; it will take millions of years,” says Dindi. “Remember that it took over 30 million years for the thickness around the rift valley to go from 40 kilometers to 35 kilometers, so it will take a long time to lose another 5 kilometers.”
Dindi says that not all rift valleys get as big as the ones we see now. Most of them fail, like the one that started to form around Wajir in the northeast of Kenya, “but failed, and the area was instead covered with sediments,” he says. “Today, when you travel across Wajir, you can only see a depression, not a rift valley.”
The East African Rift Valley, which is also called the Afro-Arabian Rift Valley, is one of the largest rifts on Earth. It goes from Jordan in southwestern Asia all the way through eastern Africa to Mozambique in the south.
The system is about 6,400 kilometers long and 48–64 kilometers wide on average.
