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In central Africa is a deep lake that has a dangerous propensity to explode – but tapping it as a source of energy could help avert disaster. Lake Kivu is one of Africa’s strangest bodies of water. An unusual set of properties make it an intriguing subject for scientists, as well as a potential source of both peril and prosperity for the millions of people living nearby. Kivu doesn’t behave like most deep lakes. Typically, when water at the surface of a lake is cooled – by winter air temperatures or rivers carrying spring snowmelt, for example – that cold,...

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...

Science - Reuters Scientists Probe Africa's Rift Valley Break-Up Sun Jan 12, 7:05 AM ET Add Science - Reuters to My Yahoo! ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) - Scientists studying Africa's slow-motion split along the Rift Valley have launched an experiment in Ethiopia to find out exactly why it is happening and whether a new ocean will form where the valley is now. Seventy-two U.S., European and Ethiopian scientists fanned out across the Horn of Africa country this weekend to conduct what they called Africa's largest ever seismic survey. The "volcanic Rift Valley...could eventually break off to form an ocean like...

Brace yourselves for an awe-inspiring geological phenomenon that is reshaping the face of Africa as we know it! Join us on an extraordinary journey as we witness the unprecedented event of Africa splitting into two distinct continents. In this captivating video, we delve deep into the geological forces at work that are gradually tearing Africa apart. Explore the vast expanse of the East African Rift System, a sprawling tectonic boundary that stretches over thousands of kilometers, signaling the emergence of a new continent. Our expert geologists provide a comprehensive overview of the fascinating processes behind this monumental event. Uncover the...

EIN GEDI, Israel — Five miles out, nearly to the center of the Dead Sea, an international team of scientists has been drilling beneath the seabed to extract a record of climate change and earthquake history stretching back half a million years. The preliminary evidence and clues found halfway through the 40-day project are more than the team could have hoped for. The scientists did not expect to pull up a wood fragment that was roughly 400,000 years old. Nor did they expect to come across a layer of gravel from a mere 50,000 to 100,000 years ago. That finding...

An Israeli company reports it has struck oil in the Dead Sea region, possibly worth up to $350 million. The company, Ginko Oil Exploration, says that oil spurted on Monday from a depth of 1,800 meters (1.12 miles), and that further tests will be carried out in the coming days. The oil, estimated at about 6.5 million barrels' worth, was found just north of the Dead Sea. Ginko extracted about 120,000 barrels of crude oil from the site about ten years ago, but gave up the initiative. The drilling has now been renewed, as it has in many places around...

The Dead Sea nearly disappeared about 120,000 years ago, say researchers who drilled more than 1,500 feet below one of the deepest parts of the politically contentious body of water. The discovery looms large at a time when the Dead Sea is shrinking rapidly, Middle Eastern nations are battling over water rights, and experts hotly debate whether the salt lake could ever dry up completely in the years to come. New data from drilled deposits are also helping piece together geological history that slices through Biblical times. Further research may offer opportunities to verify whether earthquakes destroyed the cities of...

An int'l research team at urging of TAU, Hebrew U. professors will drill half a kilometer to study year-by-year climate change from 500,000 years ago... The International Continental Scientific Drilling Program chose the Dead Sea as the site of its next drilling at the urging of Tel Aviv University's Prof. Zvi Ben-Avraham and the Israel Geological Survey's Dr. Mordechai Stein... sponsored by the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities... "We will be taking out a vertical piece about half a kilometer long which will allow us to get a picture of climate change on a year-by-year basis going back 500,000...

The Great Rift Valley extends some 4,000 miles southward from Syria north of Israel, through the Gulf of Aqaba, through Ethiopia, and all the way to Mozambique in southeast Africa. It harbors a giant fault, which has been under investigation as a model for sea floor spreading. A recent geologic event rent a gaping crack through the desert of Ethiopia, causing safety concerns for locals. These crustal plate motions may foreshadow rifting events further north in the Great Rift Valley...

A new study suggests that Homo erectus, a precursor to modern humans, was using advanced toolmaking methods in East Africa 1.8 million years ago, at least 300,000 years earlier than previously thought. The study, published this week in Nature, raises new questions about where these tall and slender early humans originated and how they developed sophisticated tool-making technology. Homo erectus appeared about 2 million years ago, and ranged across Asia and Africa before hitting a possible evolutionary dead-end, about 70,000 years ago. Some researchers think Homo erectus evolved in East Africa, where many of the oldest fossils have been found,...

Newfound stone artifacts suggest humankind left Africa traveling through the Arabian Peninsula instead of hugging its coasts... stone artifacts at least 100,000 years old... more-than-100 newly discovered sites in the Sultanate of Oman apparently confirm that modern humans left Africa through Arabia long before genetic evidence suggests. Oddly, these sites are located far inland, away from the coasts. ...in the Dhofar Mountains of southern Oman, nestled in the southeastern corner of the Arabian Peninsula... of a style dubbed Nubian Middle Stone Age, well-known throughout the Nile Valley, where they date back about 74,000-to-128,000 years... Subsequent field work turned up dozens...

Thirty million years ago, before Ethiopia's mountainous highlands split and the Great Rift Valley formed, the tropical zone had warmer soil temperatures, higher rainfall and different atmospheric circulation patterns than it does today, according to new research of fossil soils found in the central African nation. Neil J. Tabor, associate professor of Earth Sciences at SMU and an expert in sedimentology and isotope geochemistry, calculated past climate using oxygen and hydrogen isotopes in minerals from fossil soils discovered in the highlands of northwest Ethiopia. The highlands represent the bulk of the mountains on the African continent. Tabor's research supplies a...

Palaeontologists digging in the dusty wastelands of East Africa have discovered the first known chimpanzee fossil. The modest haul of just three teeth is the first hard evidence of the evolutionary path that led to today's chimpanzees. As well as shedding light on chimps, the find throws up new questions about human evolution; it seems that chimpanzees may not have been physically separated from humans as was once thought. That no one had previously found a chimpanzee fossil had long been a frustrating puzzle, comments Sally McBrearty, an anthropologist at the University of Connecticut, who made the find near Lake...

A large crack that has suddenly appeared in Kenya’s Rift Valley is evidence that Africa will eventually break apart. The crack already stretches several miles and continues to grow, but it does not go all the way across the surface. If it does, it will split the continent into two. The crack has caused part of the Nairobi-Narok highway to collapse and also accelerating seismic activity in the area, leading researchers to believe that something dramatic could happen in the future. “The Great Rift splits Africa into two plates. With what is happening we have established one plate which is...