Scientists Warn, Big Fragments That Torn Africa Will Form The Sixth Ocean On Earth

The big fragments that tear Africa will divide the continent (photo: dock. pexels)

JAKARTA - Scientists have warned that the large fragments that tore Africa will split the continent into two and form the sixth ocean on Earth.

Countries along the southeast coast will become a giant island, creating a completely new sea from Ethiopia to Mozambique.

The East African fault is said to have formed at least 22 million years ago but shows activity in recent decades - a crack appeared in the Ethiopian desert in 2005 and is widening at a rate of one inch per year.

This is the result of the movement of two tectonic plates that moved away from each other, but the exact mechanism was not fully understood at the time.

Now, a study published in June found that the massive release of super-hot rock from our core is pushing this crack.

While it is predicted that Africa will not be divided into at least five million years, Somalia and half of Kenya, Tanzania will form a new continent when it does.

"What we don't know is whether these cracks will continue at the current pace to finally open ocean basins, such as the Red Sea, and then become something much bigger, like a small version of the Atlantic Ocean," said Ken Macdonald, professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told DailyMail.com.

"Or maybe the speed will increase and achieve this goal more quickly? Or maybe it will stop, as happened with the Atlantic Ocean before the start of the true sea floor spread? With current speed, the sea with the current size around the Red Sea, may be formed in about 20-30 million years," added Macdonald.

The 35-mile stretch that emerged in 2005 has shown signs of the formation of a new sea near Ethiopia. While others tore Kenya in 2018 after heavy rains, forcing residents to flee their homes and close highways.

Macdonald said he believed the Eastern African Rift System (EARS) would cause further cracks in the future.

Geologist David Adede told the Daily Nation, local media, that he believed the cracks were initially filled with volcanic ash but heavy rains swept through the material and exposed the cracks. But local residents said the cracks occurred suddenly and quickly - some people reported feeling the shaking on the ground.

The researchers believe that EARS is getting bigger as two tectonic plates move away from each other - the Somali plates in the east and the Nubia plates in the west.

The movement of the two tectonic plates was observed in 2004 by researchers at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, which found that EARS moved several millimeters per year.

EARS stretches from Aden Bay in the north to Zimbabwe in the south and is a series of deep valleys, steep cliffs, and volcanic peaks. This geological feature is a sustainable process in dividing the continent, where the Earth's crust slowly separates.

This is likely to form due to a heat flux from the astenosphere - the hotter and weaker top of Earth's mantle - between Kenya and Ethiopia, according to the Geological Society of London. A new study from Virginia Tech appears to have confirmed the speculation.

The team used 3D simulations of the region, finding that these cracks were driven by the African Superlume, which is responsible for unusual deformations under the system.

PLANtings of continents, such as EARS, generally occur when tectonic plates move away from each other, which in turn attract and stretch the Earth's crust. This results in deformations that are usually formed perpendicular to the movement of plates.

Geophysicist, D. Sarah Stamps, compared the different deformation styles on the continent that were experiencing cracks by playing with Selly Putty.

"If you hit Selly Putty with a hammer, it could crack and break," said Stamps, professor of madya in the Department of Geoscience, part of Virginia Tech College of Science. "But if you're slowly pulling it, Selly Putty will stretch. So on a different time scale, Earth's lithosphere behaves in a different way."

Tahiry Rajaonarison, a post-doctoral researcher at New Mexico Tech who earned a doctorate at Virginia Tech, said: "We confirmed earlier that the lithospheric buoyancy move cracks, but we provide new insights that anomalous deformation could occur in East Africa."

The latest crackdown in 2018 was being debated among the scientific community, as some believed it showed real-time separation, while others believed such progress was unlikely.

A resident named Eliud Njorge Mbugua claimed to have seen the cracks pass through his house. He was only able to take some of his belongings before his house collapsed. The damage was seen on a busy highway in Maai Mahiau-Narok, Kenya.