(Since I already psted the 'Crack in the World' movie poster in the other thread on this subject.)
Posted on 07/19/2006 1:31:10 PM PDT by presidio9
The Red Sea is parting again, but this time Moses doesn’t have a hand in it.
Satellite images show that the Arabian tectonic plate and the African plate are moving away from each other, stretching the Earth's crust and widening the southern end of the Red Sea, scientists reported in this week's issue of journal Nature.
Last September, a series of earthquakes started splitting the planet's surface along a 37-mile section of the East African Rift in Afar, Ethiopia.
Using the images gathered by the European Space Agency's Envisat radar satellite, researchers looked at satellite data before and after these activities.
Earth-shattering shift
Over a period of three weeks, the crust on the sides of the rift moved apart by 26 feet and magma—enough to fill a football stadium more than 2,000 times—was injected along a vertical crack, forming a new crust.
"We think that the crust and mantle melt slowly at depths greater than 10 kilometers [6 miles], where it is hotter, forming magma (molten rock)," said Tim J Wright, study co-author, a Royal Society University Research Fellow. "This magma rises through the crust because it is less dense than the surrounding rock.”
The magma collects in magma chambers at depths of 3 to 5 kilometers [1.9 to 3 miles] where the density is the same as the crustal rocks, Wright explained. "Slowly, the pressure has been building up in these chambers until last September when it finally cracked, breaking the crust along a vertical crack. The magma was then injected into this crack."
The intrusion of magma into the gap, rather than the cracking of the crust, is responsible for segmentation of continental drifts.
This is the first rifting episode to have occurred since 1970 and the largest single rip in the Earth's continental crust during the satellite-monitoring era.
"We knew about the steady rifting process in Afar, as Arabia moves away from Africa across the rift," Wright said. "And we knew that occasionally the strain that builds up slowly over centuries is released suddenly in rifting episodes. We did not know how big the deformation could be."
Slow drift
For the past 30 million years Africa and Arabia have been going through a rifting process, the same one that formed the Red Sea. In this amount of time, the 186-mile- wide Afar depression formed.
"The ground is continually moving—much more rapidly now than before the rifting episode," Wright told LiveScience. "On average, the two sides move apart at about 2 centimeters per year [0.8 inches per year]. But, as this event demonstrates, the motion is episodic and jerky. This poses considerable hazard to the local inhabitants, which is higher for the next few years."
This latest split, added to the long-term rifting process, which is tearing the northeast of Ethiopia and Eritrea from the rest of Africa, could eventually create a huge new sea. Although such processes could take millions of years to occur, this event has given scientists an unprecedented opportunity to monitor the rupture in real time.
Is it possible that the earth will swallow up Africa? Now wouldn't that be a hoot.
Sure wish the article had a map.
We must stop plate tectonics!
(Since I already psted the 'Crack in the World' movie poster in the other thread on this subject.)
Bush and Cheney are doing it!
Giant staple guns!
Nearly as funny as if the Yellowstone volcano smokes America (And probably half the hemisphere) with a two foot layer of lava. That'd be even funnier!
Bush parts the Red Sea.
The next day's headline in the New York Times, "Bush Can't Swim!"
This process started way before last September.
ping
"Stop Global Magma Warming Now!"
Good point! But it's not as if Earth was one of the major planets.
Obviously this is a Halliburton project secretly directed by the Vice-President, so of course it's all Bush's fault.
Get ready - "It's all Bush's fault."
you meant to say ash. in any event, we humans now have enough heavy machinery, that we could actually recover from that. Plus we have about 100 people per sq. mile so humans with shovels could probably clear away the ash. This works out to each human clearing an area about 520 ft by 520 ft. or a very doable task.
Thats funny
Well, you're optimistic and I like that...But if it did kill all the inhabitants, wouldn't that be nearly as funny as the post I originally responded to?
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