Africa, the second largest continent in the world today, is splitting into two continents to be separated by a sixth ocean. This will be in the next five to 10 million years.
It has started as a giant rift or depression, known as the East African Rift, that stretches about 2,175 miles (3,500 kilometres) from the Red Sea, somewhere in Ethiopia, to Mozambique as observed in a study in 2004.
Ethiopia, Kenya, DR Congo, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Zambia, Tanzania, Malawi and Mozambique, by then, will have their own coastlines with a new ocean.
Two tectonic plates – the smaller Somalian plate and the larger Nubian (African) plate – are pulling away from each other at a few millimetres per year.
The East African Rift started forming some 35 million years ago from Arabia and the Horn of Africa as a 35-mile-long crack (56 kilometres) in Ethiopia’s desert which emerged in a study in 2005.
The shifting Nubian plate is aiding the drift in the Somalian plate and is causing the East African Rift to completely split the continent of Africa from top to bottom.
Geologists say this is not unusual: South America and Africa divided 138 million years ago at the west coast of Africa and the east coast of South America. Continents were once joined as one, they say, and these two parts fitted like two jigsaw pieces.
This is the theory of Continental Drift and was originally put forward by German geologist, Alfred Wegener (1880 – 1930), who theorized in 1912 that the world’s land was all one large supercontinent 200 million years ago.
He called this supercontinent or single protocontinent a Pangaea which over time, drifted apart into their current distribution.
The Pangaea drifted apart for the same reason that the plates are moving today. Scientists say the movement is caused by the convection currents that roll over in the upper zone of the Earth’s mantle which causes the plates to move slowly across the surface of the Earth.
Pangaea Ultima, Neopangaea, and Pangaea II are being suggested as a possible name for the new continent from Africa.
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