Pause to Wonder

– along the East African Rift, a 3,000 kilometre-long series of deep basins and flanking mountain ranges. An enormous plume of hot, partially molten rock is rising diagonally from the core-mantle boundary, some 2,900 kilometres beneath Southern Africa, and erupting at the Earth’s surface, or cooling just beneath it, in the Afar region of Ethiopia. It is the rise of this plume that is stretching the Earth’s crust to breaking point.

In September 2005, a series of fissures suddenly opened up along a 60-kilometre section as the plate catastrophically responded to the forces pulling it apart. [ read article ]