Africa is fractured: the immense crack that shows how the continent will end up dividing

In about five million years, or perhaps ten, Africa it will no longer be as we know it. The continent will split and a sea will appear between both territories. Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Malawi, Zambia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo will have coastlines, although by then there will be no countries or even humanity will survive.

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There is still a long time before the African continent ends its split, but the process has already begun and has been evident since 2005, when a huge 60-kilometre-long crack appeared in the Afar desert in Ethiopia, alerting the geologists, who have been anticipating ever since – or even before – that East Africa will eventually split to form a subcontinent.

To support his theories, in 2018 another crack appeared in Norak County, Kenya, also in East Africa, in what is known as the Great Rift Valley. That time, the opening of hundreds of kilometers destroyed roads and houses, which were initially attributed to the rains that fell in the area.

However, geologists again warned that it was the interior of the Earth that was crying out and giving signs, much faster than expected, that it was breaking apart.

At the end of February, and thanks to new satellite measurements, how could this have happened?

About 500 million years ago the continents did not exist as we know them today, but were united in what has been called Pangea, a great supercontinent. Thus, if we take a good look at a world map, we will notice that the South American Atlantic coast coincides with the African Atlantic coast, for example.

The earth’s crust is made up of tectonic plates, which are in constant motion. In South America there are the South American plate and the Nasca plate, but there are a dozen more on the entire planet, in addition to thirty smaller plates.

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In the case of Africa, there is the great Nubian plate, or African plate, but there is also the Somali plate, located in the Great Rift Valley. The movements between these and the Arabian plate are producing a geological wonder that is obsessing academics, since they can corroborate the beginning of the formation of a new continent, even if this occurs in several million more years.

Thus, these three plates are slowly separating, which will cause the division of the continent and that the territories that include countries such as Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, Djibouti and Kenya will be divided from the rest of Africa to become a large island, as already It happened with Madagascar.

“This is unique because a sedimentary basin is forming. Many of these basins have been formed in Cretaceous and Jurassic times, and the only way to understand them has been with ancient rocks,” Dr. Aldo Alván, director of the School of Geological Engineering at the Universidad Nacional Mayor de Saint Mark.

According to studies, since about 30 million years ago the eastern part of the African continent is in the process of separating from the western side at a rate of 2.5 to 5 centimeters per year.

Additionally, the Victoria microplate, also in East Africa, is rotating in the opposite direction to the rest of the plates in the region, which is causing the formation of a new sea.

In this way, the Great Rift Valley – a region full of faults, depressions, valleys and volcanoes that extends along eastern Africa – is the protagonist of how a continental rift can become an oceanic rift.

Ken Macdonald, a marine geophysicist and professor emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara, explained to NBC that each plate boundary in the Afar region – located right between the African, Somali and Arabian plates – is spreading at different rates. , but the combined forces of these are creating what is known as a ridge system that will cause the formation of a new sea.

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“The Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea will flood into the Afar region and the Great Rift Valley of East Africa and become a new ocean, and that part of East Africa will become its own separate little continent,” the expert has pointed out.

For this reason, although there are still millions of years to go before the expected division occurs, this area of ​​the African continent is a unique point on the planet where geological processes can be studied that will serve to better understand the behavior of the Earth.

Source: Elcomercio

jack

I am Jack Morton and I work in 24 News Recorder. I mostly cover world news and I have also authored 24 news recorder. I find this work highly interesting and it allows me to keep up with current events happening around the world.