A scientist has warned that an area of East Africa could break away from the rest of the continent sooner than previously thought.
A 35-mile-long crack was discovered along a section of the East African Rift (EAR) in Afar, Ethiopia, in 2005, and experts say it will eventually separate from the rest of the continent as a new body of water emerges.
The region is one of the few places on Earth that is actively being separated by continuous forces of tectonic plates, with the process said to be similar to what formed the Atlantic Ocean.
It was previously thought that it would take tens of millions of years for the split to fully occur, but Ken Macdonald, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, now says it could be more like one to five million years.
Speaking to DailyMail.co.uk, the academic said: “What might happen is that the waters of the Indian Ocean would come in and flood what is now the East African Rift Valley.”
Professor Macdonald added that in time it could become as deep as the Atlantic Ocean if waters continue to gush into it.
The track winds through Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania and half of Ethiopia, which are expected to break away to form a new, separate land mass that scientists have dubbed the “Nubian continent”.
“In the human life scale, you won’t be seeing many changes,” he explained. “You’ll be feeling earthquakes, you’ll be seeing volcanoes erupt, but you won’t see the ocean intrude in our lifetimes.”
The affected area is one of the few places on Earth that is actively being separated by continuous forces of tectonic plates, the in this case the Somali and Nubian plates, with the process said to be similar to what formed the Atlantic Ocean.
The professor explained: “There’s slippage and faults creating earthquake activity, along with visible signs of active volcanoes.
“In recent years, the main breakthroughs have been figuring out exactly where the branches of this rift system go.
“The northern part was reasonably well understood, going through Djibouti and into Kenya, but going south from there, people really had very little idea.”
Although the rift began developing around 22-25 million years ago, it was the discovery of the crack that brought attention in recent decades to the moving plates.
The Geological Society of London suggests that the phenomenon could be a result of the heat flow from the asthenosphere (the weak and ductile layer of the Earth’s upper mantle) between Kenya and Ethiopia.
A study published last year in Frontiers in Earth Science highlighted how different parts of the EAR system are showing varying levels of volcanic activity related to the cracks appearing, as per The Mail.
According to the researchers, “The Uganda, Tanzania, eastern and southern Congo, and Kaapvaal Cratons exhibit shallow high-density anomalies underlain by low-density anomalies apparently originating from deeper mantle depths, indicative of a thinning of the lithosphere, with some degree of melting at the base.”
Fissures also opened up in Kenya in 2018 following heavy rainfall, and scientists have suggested that “cracks” of this kind will continue appear as the plates shift away from each other, in a process that is expected to also see Madagascar being divided up into two islands.