Africa is splitting, and a lot sooner than estimated, giving way to a new ocean
&imwidth=600&imheight=450&format=webp&quality=medium "Africa is splitting, and a lot sooner than estimated, giving way to a new ocean")
Africa will break apart in a few million years and a new ocean will emerge as water moves from Indian Ocean. Photograph: (AI-Generated image)
Africa is splitting and will give way to a new ocean a lot sooner than previously estimated. The Turkana Rift has become extremely thin at the centre, meaning the break-up has hastened. However, this would still mean a few million years, but in Earth terms, it is quite soon.
A study had previously found that Africa is splitting, and when this happens, a new ocean will emerge. Now geologists have discovered that the timeline for this has moved back, which means this split will now occur much sooner than predicted. An active rift has reached a "critical threshold" and will soon split apart, giving way to a new ocean. The research was published in the journal Nature Communications.
While this ideally means a few million years, in geological terms, it is not that far. Christian Rowan, a geoscientist at Columbia University, said, "We found that rifting in this zone is more advanced, and the crust is thinner, than anyone had recognised." The change is largely in Eastern Africa that has “progressed further in the rifting process than previously thought.”
How is Africa splitting?
Geological changes are a part of how continents, oceans and mountains form on Earth. Sometimes the tectonic plates meet, while at other times they drift apart. The East African Rift System is responsible for what's happening in the continent, where the African Plate is splitting into two. The bigger one, with the majority of the continent, is the Nubian Plate to the west, and the smaller one is the Somali Plate, with the eastern coast and the island of Madagascar.
The focus of the study was the Turkana Rift, which stretches for hundreds of kilometres through Kenya and Ethiopia. They estimated the thickness of the crust in this region by analysing previous seismic measurements. At the centre, it is only around 13 kilometres thick. This is quite low considering that it is more than 35 kilometres thick along the edges of the rift region.
When the crust becomes thinner than about 15 kilometres, it is in a phase called "necking", during which the break-up of the continent is confirmed to happen. This phase will last a few million years, after which it will enter "oceanisation, the stage where oceans form. The necking stage has been going on for around 4 million years.
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When the crust becomes extremely thin, magma will erupt and cool down to form a basin. Water from the Indian Ocean will rush in to fill this seafloor. Scientists say this is already happening in the Afar Depression in northeast Africa near the Red Sea.
Ancient human fossils found in the African Plate rift region
Interestingly, the earliest hominin fossils and evidence found in this area are also four million years old. Scientists say the two are definitely linked, as this shows that sedimentation began accumulating faster, creating the perfect conditions for a detailed record of life from that time. "The temporal coincidence between this tectonic transition and the onset of continuous, thick fossil-bearing strata suggests that the necking phase provided critical conditions for fossil preservation," they wrote in the study.
