It’s a baby ocean!

According to a team of international scientists led by University of Leeds geophysicist Tim Wright, we’re witnessing the birth of a new ocean. In remote northern Ethiopia, the team has front-row seats to the show of the next hundred millennia. The earth is slowly being ripped apart by extreme seismic activity at the meeting point of the Arabian and African continental plates, but sometimes it shifts much faster. During the most dramatic period, September 2005, hundreds of cracks in the earth developed in just a few weeks, and sections of earth moved more than 20 feet practically overnight. As the land is pulled apart, Wright says, molten rock will rise from the earth’s core and fills in the gaps, forming new land valleys and redrawing parts of the African landscape. At that point, the scientists believe, the Red Sea could come flooding into the region.

It’s very exciting because we’re witnessing the birth of a new ocean,” said Dr Wright. “In geological terms, a million years is the blink of an eye. We don’t precisely know what is going to happen, but we believe that it may turn parts of Northern Ethiopia and Eritrea into an island, before a much larger land mass — the horn of Africa — breaks off from the continent.”