The crack is 8m-wide in places Posted on 07/19/2006 9:35:47 PM PDT by Jedi Master Pikachu
The crack is 8m-wide in places
The largest tear in the Earth's crust seen in decades, if not centuries, could carve out a new ocean in Africa, according to satellite data.
Geologists say a crack that opened up last year may eventually reach the Red Sea, isolating much of Ethiopia and Eritrea from the rest of Africa.
The 60km-long rift was initially sparked by an earthquake in September.
Follow-up observations reported in the journal Nature suggest the split is growing at an unprecedented rate.
See the rift in detail
We think if these processes continue, a new ocean will eventually form Dr Tim Wright, University of Oxford It betrays events deep beneath the ground, where some of the tectonic plates that form Africa are gradually moving apart from the Arabian plate, causing the crust to stretch and thin.
As rifts appear, molten rock bubbles up from beneath the surface, hardening to form a new strip of ocean floor.
Dr Tim Wright from the University of Oxford, UK, said if the ripping of the crust continued, the horn of Africa would eventually split off from the rest of the continent, in about a million years.
"We think if these processes continue, a new ocean will eventually form," he told the BBC News website. "It will connect to the Red Sea and the ocean will flow in."
Fundamental processes
Dr Wright is a member of a team from the UK and Ethiopia that has been monitoring the creation of the new ocean basin; a rare event on dry land.
They used sensitive seismic instruments, field measurements and satellite images from the European Space Agency's Envisat spacecraft to study what is happening beneath the ground.
"We've been able to work up all the satellite data and get a very precise map," said Dr Wright.
"It's the biggest rifting episode at least since the 1970s and possibly in hundreds of years.
"It's the first time we've been able to use satellite images to investigate the fundamental processes behind rifting."
The shift in the Earth's plates has been happening gradually over the course of two million years but every now and again earthquakes and volcanic eruptions herald sudden break-ups.
Space techniques
One such event took place in September last year, opening up a 60km-long (37 mile) stretch of a fault-line that runs from Ethiopia to the southern edge of the Red Sea.
Leeds PhD student James Hammond bringing home the camels laden with seismic and GPS gear. Photo by Tim Wright, University of Leeds/Oxford. An international team is monitoring two million years of rock history "It's amazing," said Cindy Ebinger, from Royal Holloway, University of London.
"It's the first large event we have seen like this in a rift zone since the advent of some of the space-based techniques we're now using.
"These techniques give us a resolution and a detail to see what's really going on and how the Earth processes work."
Scientists have calculated that 2.5 cubic km (0.6 cubic mile) of magma has flowed up through the crack in the Earth's crust.
It is enough to fill London's Wembley stadium 2,000 times or smother the area within the capital's M25 orbital motorway with molten rock to a depth of 1m (1 yard).
An international team is monitoring two million years of rock history
Time to start building condos.
What sort of ocean is doughnut shaped with a continent smack dab in the middle of it?
Seems premature to project the result as an "ocean". There isn't even enough land around it to encircle an ocean. But interesting nonetheless. Someone better notify Al Gore so he can blame Bush.
Related article.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1668691/posts
I'm glad somebody is watching these guys:
This is pretty much how the Atlantic Ocean started.
BD476 PING PLEASE
ack LOL
Way cool!
This is great news. Now when the global warming raises sea levels there will be a place for all of the water to go. A win/win situation if I ever saw one.
It has been seriously suggested in some circles. Simply blasting a helper channel (in some places, only a couple hundred meters of rock are in the way) between the east African rift zones and the ocean would be sufficient to absorb the projected rise of the ocean. As an added benefit, it would reverse desertification on the continent.
The downside being that some African countries would largely disappear under water.
Expanded Earth ...OCEAN FLOOR FORMATION- HOW EXPANSION EXPLAINS THEM
Wincom needs to create some better graphics....
Expanded Earth Theory and Electric Universe
double knockout
Sorry Sagan....Velikovsky was right : )
Venus is not Earths Twin with runaway greenhouse
comets are not dirty snowballs,
Black holes do not exist.
I think I watched that through dozens of cycles. Very cool!
When I first read the title, I thought lefty eco-nuts were now giving birth in the ocean.
Bush's fault, ah, so to speak.
What downside? Who's going to miss parts of Ethiopia, Sudan, or Somalia?
Maybe the people who live there?
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