The tectonic plates shift year after year. This happens in all parts of the world, but geologists are especially excited about Africa. A new ocean could arise there, dividing the continent in two. The world is constantly on the move – in the truest sense of the word. The tectonic plates under our feet are constantly moving. At speeds that even snails might find slow, but still fast enough to change maps in millions of years. “Large and well-known plates that are often referred to are the African, North American, Eurasian and also the Pacific plate, which is almost completely under the water. They move back and forth on the surface of the earth,” says Sascha Brune im ntv podcast “Learned again”. The geophysicist from the GFZ German Research Center for Geosciences also emphasizes that “the continents as we know them today are constantly changing. The world map looked” completely different, for example 80 million years ago. ”
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Sascha Brune and his colleagues at GFZ deal with plate shifts day in and day out. They create models on the computer that can be used to simulate displacements into the most distant future. Measurements on the ground, planes and satellites provide geoscientists with new information. The most exciting are currently being recorded south of Europe. “In Africa there is the largest rift valley that we have in the world. That is of course a playground where a lot of data is collected and where you can best understand what is happening there,” Brune refers to the so-called Afar Valley in northern Ethiopia. In this extremely hot and dry lowland there are several volcanic craters as well as numerous deep crevices and cracks. Here the researchers can watch with their own eyes how the African continent is slowly falling apart. “Those are the obvious scars that the rift is leaving in Africa,” says the geophysicist.
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The so-called “East African Rift Valley” stretches from the Afar region in eastern Ethiopia south to Mozambique. Along this line, the African continent could split into two parts. Whether this will happen is another matter, explains Brune. It is far from clear whether a new ocean is emerging in East Africa because part of it is settling. “There are rifts where the continents break apart and at some point a new ocean is created. But there are also examples where such rifts stop being active at some point, for example in West Africa.” In theory, the plates could eventually stop drifting apart. Man has no influence on it. For geoscientists like Sascha Brune, their work is about showing different possibilities of what can happen.

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Scientists from Virginia Tech and the University of Antananarivo in Madagascar have also set up a corresponding model. Accordingly, the so-called East African Rift extends further than previously assumed, to the island state of Madagascar east of Mozambique in the Indian Ocean. The researchers predict that the island will slowly break apart over the next million years.

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