A giant rift is slowly tearing Africa apart

BY KAHA G. – 15 YEARS OLD

Let’s jump into this quite interesting topic, a question focusing on Africa’s geographical fate, that may occur down the line. I know geography isn’t a fun subject, but it does have fascinating aspects connected to it.

Do you know about Pangea and the history behind it? No? 230 million years ago, when dinosaurs were still roaming around, all the continents were arranged into one single supercontinent called Pangea, which in Greek means “all land.” It eventually broke apart for the same reason that tectonic plates are moving today. A process called continental drift, which means the continents slowly fractured and went their separate ways.

Now that I’ve got that out of the way, you’ll realize a similar situation could be happening to Africa. The burning question is what if Africa split into two continents?

A giant rift is slowly tearing the continent apart, called the East African Rift. That is a system of valleys that stretches about 2,175 miles (3,500 kilometers) long, from the Red Sea to Mozambique.

What is a rift you ask? Well, it is a crack, split, or break in something. To truly find out if this possibility is true, we have to look at the foundation, aka the tectonic plates, which are described as the outer parts of the planet’s surface that can collide with each other, making mountains, or pull apart.

The eastern rift passes through Ethiopia and Kenya, while the western rift runs in an arc from Uganda to Malawi, noted by the Geological Society of London. As well as that, they’re most likely formed because of heat flowing up from the asthenosphere, the hotter, weaker, upper part of Earth’s mantle between Kenya and Ethiopia. This heat caused the overlying crust to expand and rise, leading to the stretching and fracturing of the brittle continental rock. This led to substantial volcanic activity, including the formation of Mount Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa.

Additionally, the existence of the eastern and western rifts and the discovery of offshore zones of earthquakes and volcanoes indicate that Africa is slowly opening along several lines, which together amount to more than 0.25 inches (6.35 millimeters) per year. I know that doesn’t seem like a lot but trust me it is. “The rifting right now is very slow, about the rate that one’s toenails grow,” Ken Macdonald, a distinguished professor of Earth science at the University of California, told Live Science. That’s when you know it’s bad when comparing it to the growth of the toenail, because it feels like we look away for one second and it becomes out of control.

It’s hard to know if this rifting will continue, or if Africa splitting will occur sooner than anticipated. What do you think?