Pulsing Mantle Beneath Africa May Create a New Ocean

Deep beneath East Africa, scientists have discovered powerful forces at work that could eventually split the continent in two and create a brand-new ocean—though not for a long while. New research reveals that pulsing molten rock beneath Ethiopia is reshaping the land from below, offering a rare glimpse into the dramatic birth of an ocean basin. Scientists are closely monitoring the Afar region in east Africa, where a plume of molten rock is rising beneath the ground and slowly pushing the African continent apart, per BBC Wildlife Magazine.

Researchers describe Afar as a "triple junction," where three major rifts—the Main Ethiopian Rift, the Red Sea Rift, and the Gulf of Aden Rift—are pulling tectonic plates in different directions. The mantle plume beneath Afar is not static. Instead, it pulses, and these pulses are influenced by factors such as crust thickness and the speed at which rifts are spreading, say the authors of the study published Wednesday in Nature Geoscience, per Live Science. "At the present rate, a sea about the size of the current Red Sea might form in about 20-30 million years," UC Santa Barbara oceanographer Ken Macdonald, an outside researcher, previously told Earth.com.