Cracking the African continent and will be split

Large cracks in Africa Will Be a New Ocean

KOMPAS.com - Gap along the 55 kilometers in the desert of Ethiopia is expected to develop into a new ocean. Slit width of 6 meters at some point it started to open in 2005, and some geologists believe it will become the embryo of a new ocean.

In a study involving a team of international researchers and reported in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, revealed that the gap formation process is similar to what happened in the bottom of the ocean. The same activity is also happening in the Red Sea.

Using seismic data set from 2005, researchers try to reconstruct events to show that the slit open along the 55 kilometers in just a few days. At first, Dabbahu, which is a volcano on the northern tip of crack, erupt, then the flow of magma pushed through the middle of the gap and began to open cracks in both directions.

"We know that the mountains of the sea floor appears due to magma pressure like this, but we'll never know that the magma pressure can make it split like this," said Cindy Ebinger, Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Rochester.

It shows that the active volcanoes along the edge of the ocean tectonic plates can suddenly rupture in large part, and not in small part as believed so far. Events cracks that come suddenly in the mainland would be more dangerous for the people living around it, "says Ebinger.

African and Arabian plates meet in the remote Afar desert of Ethiopia broke due to the North are now beginning the process with a rate of less than 1 inch per year for 30 million years. This gap Afar depression formed along the 300 miles to the Red Sea. Through that route, the Red Sea is expected to flow into the cracks Ethiopia and formed a new sea about a million years. The new ocean will connect the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea between Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula and Somalia in East Africa.