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New Ocean Forming Beneath Ethiopia?

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I’m obviously among the last to know since it took my mother to tell me this morning that a new ocean has been discovered, forming beneath Ethiopia. Apparently Africa is splitting apart at the seams, literally. According to a report by Scientific American, from the southern tip of the Red Sea southward through Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania and Mozambique, the continent is coming un­­stitched along a zone called the East African Rift, “like a shirtsleeve tearing under a bulging bicep.” This spectacular geologic unraveling, already under way for millions of years, will be complete when saltwater from the Red Sea floods the massive gash. Ten million years from now the entire rift may be submerged. Which makes me wonder if it will then be host to its own “garbage patch,” filled with floating plastic or whatever other detritus we’ve left behind.

This region of the African continent, known to geologists as the Afar Depression, is pulling apart in two directions—a process that is gradually thinning the earth’s rocky outer skin. The continental crust under Afar is a mere twelve miles from top to bottom, less than half its original thickness, and parts of the area are over three hundred feet below sea level. Low hills to the east are all that stops the Red Sea from encroaching.

Back in 2005, when a massive 35-mile-long rift broke open in the Ethiopia desert some geologists controversially claimed that a new ocean was forming. Currently, scientists from several countries have supposedly confirmed that the volcanic processes at work beneath the Ethiopian rift are nearly identical to those at the bottom of the world’s oceans, and the rift may likely be the beginning of a new sea. A reconstruction of events shows that the rift did not open in a series of small earthquakes over an extended period of time, but tore open along its entire 35-mile length in just days. A volcano called Dabbahu 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.

Such proximity to the planet’s scorching interior has transformed the region into a dynamic landscape of earthquakes, volcanoes and hydrothermal fields—making Afar a veritable paradise for people, like me, eager to understand those processes. Yet few outsiders, scientists included, have ever set foot in Afar. Daytime temperatures soar to 48 degrees Celsius (118 degrees Fahrenheit) in the summer, and no rain falls for much of the year. But I knew I faced more than treacherous geology and climate. Nasty geopolitical struggles—namely, war between Ethiopia and neighboring Eritrea—combine with those natural hardships to make Afar utterly inhospitable.

Geologists predict another million years of the land stretching and sinking, combined with a massive deluge from the Red Sea, could put Afar at the bottom of a new ocean. For now, this incip­ient seabed is a desolate landscape where lava stifles vegetation, hellish heat makes acid boil, devilish formations emit toxic fumes, and the salty legacy of ancient Red Sea floods provides nomadic tribes of Afar with a precious export.


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