Giant crack in Africa may create a new oceanStudy: Volcanic boundaries in Ethiopia may break apart in large sections
LiveScience.com: A 35-mile [56km] rift in the desert of Ethiopia will likely become a new ocean eventually, researchers now confirm. The crack, 20 feet [6m] wide in spots, opened in 2005... A new study involving an international team of scientists and reported in the journal Geophysical Research Letters finds the processes creating the rift are nearly identical to what goes on at the bottom of oceans, further indication a sea is in the region's future. The same rift activity is slowly parting the Red Sea...
The rift tore open along its entire length in just days. Dabbahu, a volcano at the northern end of the rift, erupted first, then magma pushed up through the middle of the rift area and began 'unzipping' the rift in both directions...
The result shows that highly active volcanic boundaries along the edges of tectonic ocean plates may suddenly break apart in large sections, instead of in bits, as the leading theory held. And such sudden large-scale events on land pose a much more serious hazard to populations living near the rift than would several smaller events...
The African and Arabian plates meet in the remote Afar desert of Northern Ethiopia and have been spreading apart in a rifting process -- at a speed of less than 1 inch [2.5cm] per year -- for the past 30 million years. This rifting formed the 186-mile [300km] Afar depression and the Red Sea. The thinking is that the Red Sea will eventually pour into the new sea in a million years or so. The new ocean would connect to the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, an arm of the Arabian Sea between Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula and Somalia in eastern Africa.
