United States: Africa is changing in a big way! Tectonic forces are somehow slowly pulling the continent apart, and this could create a brand-new ocean and also in the East African Rift System, a huge network of cracks in the Earth’s surface, is at the center of this change. These cracks are actually spreading faster than expected, dramatically reshaping the land.
With tectonic plates splitting apart at a much faster pace as researchers are discovering today, there are amazing new revelations underway about this aspect of the future – but quite fascinating and breathtaking is the rest of the story of the changes it has brought to the geography and wildlife of Africa. Is this timeline for a new ocean sooner than people think?
Africa is experiencing an exciting change, as plates push themselves to create a new ocean. Situated at the center of this seismal occurrence is East African Rift System, a string of faults that ran from Mozambique to the Red Sea. New investigations show that in the future, the tectonic plates in the area are moving apart faster, which may lead to the changes of the continent’s surface and wildlife in thousands of years.
As reported by Daily Galaxy, this process, which used to take tens of millions of years was estimated to take a million years or less – if not less than that.
Tectonic action is changing Africa’s geography faster than it was previously estimated.
The displacement arising from the African and Somali plates is about 0.8 cm per year, which is contributing significantly to the development of a huge rift in East Africa. This rift in the middle of the desert stretch for 60-kilometer width in Ethiopia and is up to 10 meter deep. Such changes, while slow on a human timescale, mark the early stages of a significant geological event: the start of a new oceanic phase is considered.
Cynthia Ebinger, a geoscientist from Tulane University, emphasizes the accelerating pace of this transformation:
“Well, we have managed to cut the frame down to about 1 million years, at most, 500 thousand,” adds Ebinger. She also observes that a major catastrophe, like an earthquake, might accelerate the process, although gauging the tempo of the event scientifically poses a problem. Migiro 2006, therefore, postulates that a major catastrophe shall actually accelerate the process, though measuring the tempo scientifically poses a major challenge.