Red Sea parting to create new ocean
Red Sea parting to create new ocean
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Thursday, 20, Jul 2006 11:07
A new ocean basin is being creating in Ethiopia due to a rip in the Earth's continental crust in the southern end of the Red Sea.
Discussed in this week's edition of the journal Nature, the rift was observed by the European Space Agency's Envisat radar satellite.
The crust is being stretched and thinned as part of a slow rupture of the crust as the Arabic tectonic plate moves away from the African plate. This rifting process has been taking place for the past 30 million years, but occasionally rips take place in lurches due to events such as earthquakes and volcanic activity.
Such rifting took place during September last year after an earthquake in Boina , 400km north-east of Addis Ababa, resulted in one 60 kilometre-long segment of the east African rift zone opening more than four meters.
The rift is part of a long-term split that is currently tearing the north-east of Ethiopia from the rest of Africa and could eventually create a huge new sea.
Although the complete process of creating a new ocean takes millions of years, the event is said to be unprecedented in scientific history and has given scientists the ability to monitor the rupture at first hand.
"It's amazing. It's the first large event we have seen like this in a rift zone since the advent of some of the space-based techniques we're now using. These techniques give us a resolution and a detail to see what's really going on and how the earth processes work," said Dr Cindy Ebinger, from Royal Holloway, University of London.