The African continent is splitting in two, albeit very slowly. As you can imagine, this separation event, like everything else in the field of geology, is an extremely long process that will take millions of years, but will eventually cause part of East Africa to break away from the rest of the continent, possibly creating a new ocean between the two land masses.
The massive rupture is the East African Rift System, one of the world’s largest rifts, stretching thousands of kilometers downstream through several countries in Africa, including Ethiopia, Kenya, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Zambia, Tanzania, Malawi, and Mozambique. associated with EARS).
Due to this rift system, the African plate is split into two plates—the smaller Somali plate and the larger Nubian plate—that move apart at a super-slow rate of one millimeter per year, according to a 2004 study.
In 2018, news of a crack in Kenya went viral, and many claimed it was proof that Africa was splitting in two before our eyes. While this eerie scene is about EARS, presenting it as living proof of Africa’s great division would not be entirely accurate.
This fissure was probably a highly localized expression of regular rifting activity of the valley. EARS has been going on for about 25 million years, and the Kenya crack can be interpreted as an indirect whisper of what’s happening on the continent.
However, it seems possible that changes in EARS will result in a drastically different-looking world in 5 to 10 million years. Around this time period, a new oceanic form will likely form between the Somali plate and the Nubian plate, the African continent will lose its eastern part, and a vast sea will separate East Africa.
As strange as this may seem, it is worth remembering that the Earth’s surface is in a state of constant change, but because it is so slow that human experience cannot detect it. The view of the world as we know it is relatively new. The continents and sea we see today (Eurasia, America, Africa, Antarctica and Oceania) arose as a result of large tectonic plates that came together like a puzzle. But these puzzle pieces move very slowly on a time scale of millions of years.
The departure of East Africa will be another page in this huge geological story. Time will tell if humanity will live on the planet long enough to see any of these changes.
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