00:00Africa is literally tearing apart.
00:02Geologists say that the African continent is slowly splitting into two massive pieces.
00:06A process that began tens of millions of years ago and continues even today.
00:11So what is actually happening beneath our feet?
00:14Researchers from Keele University in the UK have been studying magnetic data
00:18that reveal how this split began, specifically between African and Arabian plates.
00:24Now these two landmasses were once locked together like puzzle pieces.
00:28But over time, tectonic forces, those same ones that move continents, started pulling them apart.
00:34Imagine unzipping a jacket from northeast to south.
00:38That's how the rift is spreading, accompanied by volcanic eruptions and earthquakes.
00:43Now it is a slow motion breakup on a continental scale.
00:47And yes, when it's all done in maybe 5 to 10 million years,
00:51Africa will have transformed into two separate landmasses.
00:55The larger one to the west will include countries like Egypt, Nigeria, Ghana, Algeria, and Namibia.
01:02And the smaller one to the east will carry Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, and parts of Ethiopia.
01:10Now between them, a brand new ocean will eventually form,
01:14just as others did millions of years ago through a process called seafloor spreading.
01:20Now this is all part of plate tectonics, the grand theory explaining how Earth's crust shifts over geological time.
01:27The same process that once is split apart the giant supercontinent Pangea,
01:32meaning all of Earth's landmasses, will now sculpt the Africa of the future.
01:36The east African rift is at the heart of this story.
01:39Stretching over 4,000 miles from Jordan all the way down to Mozambique,
01:43it's one of the planet's most dramatic tectonic features.
01:47Drift cuts through massive lakes, Turkana, Tamanakia, and Malawi,
01:51and is constantly reshaping the terrain.
01:53But the real hotspot, scientists say, is the Afar region of northeastern Africa,
01:58where the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, and the main Ethiopian rift intersect.
02:03Now this triple junction is something of a geological crossroads.
02:06Here the Earth's crust is so stretched that it's beginning to crack apart,
02:10creating fissures and valleys visible even from space.
02:14That's where the key researchers focused their study.
02:17They dug into old magnetic data from surveys done in the late 1960s.
02:21And yes, 50-year-old records I'm talking about.
02:25And they used these records into modern computer models to re-analyze them.
02:30What they found is striking.
02:31The magnetic fingerprints buried in the rocks matched those seen in oceanic crust created at mid-ocean ridges.
02:37Now when Earth's magnetic poles flip, something that happens every few hundred thousand years,
02:43they leave behind magnetic strips in the crust.
02:46The researchers found those strips between Africa and Arabia,
02:49proving that seafloor spreading has already begun there.
02:53Now it's like reading the Earth's diary through magnetic ink.
02:56Dr. Emma Watts, a geochemist at Swansea University, says that the rift is widening at a rate of about 5-16 mm per year.
03:04Those slower than your fingernail grows, but it's powerful enough to one day reshape continents.
03:10So no, you won't wake up tomorrow to find a new ocean between Kenya and Ethiopia,
03:15but our planet is always moving, always evolving, even when it feels rock solid.
03:21And in Africa's case, that slow movement is writing the next chapter of Earth's geological story.
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