 |
| Image Via Marca |
According to academics, developing a new ocean in the distant future might split Africa in two.
Two large portions of the continent are separating, potentially resulting in the formation of a new body of water, i.e., an ocean.
It implies that landlocked countries like Uganda and Zambia might soon have beaches.
The emergence of the East African Rift, a 56-kilometer-long fissure in Ethiopia's deserts in 2005, signified the start of the construction of a new sea.
According to research, When the lithosphere is subjected to a horizontal stretching force, it stretches and becomes thinner. Eventually, it ruptures, resulting in the formation of a rift valley.
This process is accompanied by surface phenomena along the trench fault in the form of volcanism and seismic activity. Trench ruptures are the initial stage of continental breakup and, if successful, can lead to forming of a new ocean basin. An example of a place on Earth where this has happened is the South Atlantic, which was created by the breakup of South America and Africa about 138 million years ago - have you ever noticed how their coastlines fit together like pieces of the same puzzle?
Continental drift requires extensional forces large enough to break up the lithosphere. The East African Rift is described as an active rift, where the source of these stresses is the circulation of the underlying mantle. Beneath this rift, the lithosphere is arched upward by the rise of a large mantle plume, weakening it as temperatures rise and causing it to be stretched and fractured by faulting.
This hotter-than-average mantle plume has been detected in geophysical data. It is often referred to as the "African Superswell" This superplume is not only a widely accepted source of the pull-apart forces that led to the formation of the rift valley. It also explains the anomalously high topography of the southern and eastern African plateau.
