The Great Rift in East Africa is one of the few spots on Earth being actively separated by tectonic activity and will eventually break apart altogether – with one US academic now theorising this could happen much sooner than we thought
Africa could be torn apart like paper amidst warnings a chunk of the continent is breaking away.
An area of East Africa could be separated from the continent sooner than previously thought, with a 35-mile crack along the East African rift in Afar currently under watch. Experts monitoring the gap say the deepening crack will eventually separate from the rest of the continent as water emerges, effectively reshaping the world map.
It’s one of the few spots on Earth where tectonic activity is actively separating parts of the planet’s crust. But while initial observation estimated the actual separation could take tens of millions of years, one academic is now claiming the separation could in fact happen much sooner than suspected.
Professor Ken Macdonald from the University of California, Santa Barbara, estimates this could be as soon as one to five million years. Speaking to DailyMail.co.uk, the academic said: “What might happen is that the waters of the Indian Ocean would come in and flood what is now the East African Rift Valley.”
The academic, who specialises in tectonic faults and mid-ocean ridges said, the crack could be deepened as low as the floor of the Atlantic Ocean if waters continue to gush into it. The track winds through Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania and half of Ethiopia, which are expected to break away to form a new, separate land mass that scientists have dubbed the “Nubian continent”.
“In the human life scale, you won’t be seeing many changes,” he explained. “You’ll be feeling earthquakes, you’ll be seeing volcanoes erupt, but you won’t see the ocean intrude in our lifetimes.”
Africa’s Great Rift is one of the few places on Earth being actively separated by tectonic activity, with the Somali and Nubian plates moving apart. This process is how the Atlantic Ocean eventually came into being 150 million years ago during the Jurassic Period. Once clustered together, the continents were divided when a rift formed in what was once Pangea, widening a gap between it and creating the East and West hemispheres.
Prof Macdonald added: “There’s slippage and faults creating earthquake activity, along with visible signs of active volcanoes. In recent years, the main breakthroughs have been figuring out exactly where the branches of this rift system go.
“The northern part was reasonably well understood, going through Djibouti and into Kenya, but going south from there, people really had very little idea.”
