Africa could one day be ‘split into two’ after a huge crack that continues to grow appeared in the continent.
Go back 200 million years, and our seven continents were all concentrated together in one supergroup named Pangea.
But over time, these broke up and drifted apart, transforming into the configuration we’re familiar with today.
Within our own lifetimes though, there have been some huge changes on Earth, with environmental factors causing rising sea levels and melting ice caps, which are already altering how our countries looks.
Then, there are tectonic plates, which are believed to be happening over a much longer period of time.
For those who didn’t pay attention in geography, this is the movement of the Earth’s crust as the plates grind into each other on the surface of the mantle – an event which was initially referred to as the continental drift.
And it appears that Africa is currently bearing the brunt of this shift, with several huge cracks appearing down the world’s second-largest continent.
What is happening in Africa?
Back in 2018, a massive crack some 50 feet deep and 65 feet wide suddenly appeared in Kenya’s Great Rift Valley. The Valley is around 4,000 miles (6,400 kilometers) long and stretches from the Afar region down to Mozambique.
While the rift is currently above sea level, over time, it will widen and the crust will thin and sink.
It’s thought to be slowly moving further apart each year, but it could take a while for the land to completely split.
What is causing the crack?
Some scientists have suggested that this is due to the African tectonic plate breaking in two, which could result in landlocked countries like Zambia and Uganda having their own coastlines in the distant future.
But this is not the only theory that geologists have about the how the crack has formed, as others have suggested that the cause could be soil erosion.
Meanwhile, some, including Lucía Pérez Díaz – a postdoctoral researcher at Royal Holloway University of London – think it’s a combination of both.
Díaz suggested it could be softer soils filling in a rift-related fault and leading to the cracks we are seeing on the surface.
Her research suggested that over the course of tens of millions of years, the ocean will begin to fill in the gap as the rift reaches the coast.
Once the ocean floods in, it ultimately makes the African continent smaller, with a large island made of parts of Ethiopia and Somalia sitting in the Indian Ocean.
A similar event, albeit with different causes, happened when the British Isles were cut off from mainland Europe.
Until around 450,000 years ago the British Isles were connected to Europe, but the erosion of a valley in what is now the English Channel caused a catastrophic flood as the sea rushed in.
This left what would have been the westernmost extremity of Europe as a brand new set of islands.
