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Is Africa splitting apart?
I got hit with this image a few days ago and some of you sent it to me too. It’s apparently proof that Africa is splitting.
Not so fast.
That is NOT proof that Africa is splitting.
THAT is erosion due to heavy rains in Kenya in 2018 (Narok County near Suswa Volcano, Kenya). But that doesn’t make it less scary, and the basic conditions which allowed this to happen are definitely tied to millennia of tectonic plates shifting below the ground.
That shifting WILL eventually split Africa, though it might take about 5-10 million years.
The ground below us sits on these giant tectonic plates that are slowly but constantly moving beneath our feet. (I’m not a geologist so that’s the deepest I can go with that).
We don’t usually notice it unless there’s a big event like an earthquake, but over long periods of time those movements do create rifts that we can see (and jump into in some cases).
There are rifts all over the world. They’re pretty incredible. If you zoom out, you can make out the outlines of the different plates – kind of like seams that stitch together the globe.
They can move side by side, into each other, or away from each other.
One of the coolest is the Silfra Fissure in Iceland, which is a real live current split between two tectonic plates. It’s also the only one I know of that you can dive into. Yeah, you can swim between the plates of the earth here. I’m just waiting for dinosaurs to pop out.
#kenya #narok #silfra #iceland #rift #riftvalley #rifts #faults #faultlines #tectonic #tectonicplates
