Crack the African continent and will Torn?

KOMPAS.com - Gap along the 55 kilometers in the desert of Ethiopia is expected to develop into a new ocean. 6 meters wide slit at some point it begins to open in 2005, and some geologists believe it will become the embryo of a new ocean.

In a study involving a team of international researchers and reported in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, revealed that the gap formation process is similar to what happened in the bottom of the ocean. The same activity is happening today in the Red Sea.

Using seismic data set from 2005, the researchers tried to reconstruct events to show that the gap is open throughout the 55 kilometers in just a few days. Initially, Dabbahu, which is a volcano at the north end of the crack, split, and the flow of magma pushed through the middle of the gap and began to open cracks in both directions.

"We know that the mountains appeared from the ocean floor as magma pressure, but we'll never know that the magma pressure can make it split like this," said Cindy Ebinger, Professor of Earth and Environment at the University of Rochester.

It shows that the active volcanoes along the edge of the ocean tectonic plates can suddenly broke out in large part, and not in small part as believed so far. Events crack came suddenly in the land would be more dangerous for people living in the vicinity, "Ebinger said.

African and Arabian plates meet in the remote Afar desert of North Ethiopia is beginning to split from the process with a rate of less than 1 inch per year over the last 30 million years. This gap Afar depression formed along the 300 km to the Red Sea. Through this route, the Red Sea is expected to flow into the crack in Ethiopia and formed a new sea about a million years. The new ocean will connect the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea between Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula and Somalia in East Africa.