Africa is Splitting in Two, Creating Dozens of Volcanoes

The process of rifting in Africa means that the continent is slowly breaking apart and with that comes lots of volcanoes, some with the potential for massive explosive eruptions.

Rocky Planet iconRocky Planet
By Erik Klemetti
Nov 19, 2019 2:00 PMNov 19, 2019 8:38 PM
East African Rift, Annotated
A view of the East African Rift in Ethiopia and Eritrea, taken by the Terra MODIS imager on November 8, 2019. NASA.

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The modern geography of Earth is created by the plate tectonic engine that runs in our planet. What we see as familiar maps today would have looked very different 50 million, 500 million, 3 billion years ago. That's because the continents shift over time at rates of centimeters per year.

This might not seem like much, but over geologic time, that means they can collide and separate multiple times. At some points in Earth's history, we had supercontinents, when all the landmasses were one. Today, we're almost at the opposite end of the spectrum, with many continents far apart.

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