Will We Have a New Ocean in Africa?

In the days before and after a rift opened in the Ethiopian Desert in September 2005, the ground shook with no fewer than 420 earthquakes. Volcanic activity bubbled across the landscape, sending ash into the sky. In the climactic event, the earth ripped itself apart like a pair of too-tight jeans, opening up a 35-mile fissure. Some 25,000 herders fled the first major new “dike intrusion” to hit land since the 1970s, according to one paper.

Scientists rushed to the rift, hoping to study a process that typically occurs underwater, at the mid-ocean ridge, where volcanic material forms new oceanic crust. Exactly how this plays out on land, however, is poorly understood.

An early paper on the rift, led by Atalay Ayele, an associate professor at Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia, drew a parallel to the underwater variety, calling the new land one an “incipient oceanic rift,” which could further divide the land.