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Birth of a New African Ocean
Khemisty writes "Formation of an ocean is a rare event, one no scientist has ever witnessed. Yet this geophysical nativity is unfolding today in one of the hottest and most inhospitable corners of the globe. Africa is splitting apart at the seams. 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." This stretching of the earth's crust has been going on for 20 million years, and within another 10 million the Red Sea will have broken through to create a new sea.
blamemoses.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
That 10 million years from now, the split will be complete. Slashdot will report this, and one /.er will complain, "It's a dupe! This story appeared 10 million years ago! What's up with the cyborg editors?"
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
... without relief maps.
I don't want to read some art's grads long winded verbose description of something that can be shown to me in 2 diagrams.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Still waiting for Linux to win the desktop.
I blame gay marriages, higher taxes and Obama Bin Laden. Sarah Palin will go maverick and fix this for us.
"Formation of an ocean is a rare event, one no scientist has ever witnessed. Yet this geophysical nativity is unfolding today in one of the hottest and most inhospitable corners of the globe. Africa is splitting apart at the seams. 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." This stretching of the earth's crust has been going on for 20 million years, and within another 10 million the Red Sea will have broken through to create a new sea.
So actually *every scientist* has witnessed this event...
KeS
It's in this part of eastern Africa, adjacent to the junction of the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden in Ethiopia and Eritrea, and is known as the Afar Depression. All this black stuff is Erte Ale, a volcano that is almost continuously erupting. You can see the fresh black lava flows that historically oozed down the sides, and if you zoom in, you can see the red glow of the lava lake. The salt pan areas mentioned in the article are to the north (Danakil Depression), and are well below sea level (the Wikipedia page on the former settlement of Dallol notes that Dallol is 50m above sea level, but that's the settlement site, not the lake/salt pan, which is lower). There are vast areas of stretched and faulted crust to the southeast (the cliffs are the fault scarps), and Lake Assal, another salt lake 153 metres below sea level.
This area is more impressive if you fly over it in Google Earth rather than Google Maps. Practically every cone-shaped peak you see in this area is a volcano that has been recently or not so recently active, and to the south you can clearly see the flanks of the East African Rift and the series of lakes that occupy the rift valley as far south as Kenya, Tanzania and Mozambique, interspersed with volcanoes all along the way. This is an awesome part of the world for geology.