Featured Image Credit: Africa Infohub/YouTube
Topics: Science
Callum Jones
As I'm sure many of us are aware, the Earth is an ever-changing planet, and that can be a scary prospect for a lot of us.
Whether we are thinking about our great, great grandkids in a hundred years, or how it may affect us, knowing what is going on with our planet is rather important.
And one continent that is being greatly impacted by the ever-changing planet is Africa, especially with the ongoing East African Rift.
The rift has received a lot more media attention in recent years, following a sudden large crack that appeared in Kenya in 2018.
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It caused massive destruction in the south-western part of the country, and leading part of a local highway to collapse.
While initial theories believed this was linked to the East African Rift, geologists say that the feature was most likely caused by soil erosion.
However, postdoctoral researcher at Royal Holloway University of London, Lucía Pérez Díaz says the crack could also be because of the erosion of soft soils infilling an old rift-related fault, hence linking it back to the rift.
But what is causing this to happen?
Let's hope you were listening to your geography and science lessons back at school.
While the Earth's change may not seem noticeable to us, tectonic plates are constantly moving.
The Earth's lithosphere, which is formed by the crust and the upper part of the mantle, is broken up into a number of these tectonic plates.
As mentioned, these plates are not stationery, and the movement causing them to move around can also rupture.
This can lead to a rift forming and the creation of a new plate boundary, which Diaz says is happening at the East African Rift.
The East African Rift itself stretches over a staggering 3,000km from the Gulf of Aden in the north towards Zimbabwe in the south.
As a result, it splits the African plate into two unequal parts: the Somali and Nubian plates.
The rift has varying different attributes across its 3,000km distance, with the south seeing faulting occur over a wider area, and volcanism and seismicity are limited.
But if you head towards the Afar region, the entire rift valley floor is covered with volcanic rocks.
Diaz suggests that this means the lithosphere has thinned almost to the point of complete break up.
And over a period of tens of millions of years, a new ocean will lead to seafloor spreading along the entire length of the rift, which is apparently beginning to happen already.
The ocean will then flood in, leaving the African continent smaller and a large island made of parts of Ethiopia and Somalia sitting in the Indian Ocean.