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A map of East Africa showing some of the historically active volcanoes (as red triangles) and the Afar Triangle (shaded at the center), which is a so-called triple junction (or triple point) where three plates are pulling away from one another: the Arabian plate and two parts of the African plate—the Nubian and Somali—splitting along the East African Rift Zone Main rift faults, plates ...
Motion of Nubia Plate Central African Shear Zone. The geology of Africa is varied and complex, and gives rise to the wide variety of landscapes found across the continent. The African continent rests over two main plates. The African Plate, accounting for the whole of north Africa, and the Somali Plate, which accounts for the eastern side of ...
Geologists predict that in about 10 million years the whole 6,000 km (3,700 mi) length of the East African Rift will be submerged, forming a new ocean basin as large as today's Red Sea, and separating the Somali plate and the Horn of Africa from the rest of the continent. [9] The floor of the Afar Depression is composed of lava, mostly basalt.
The Gregory Rift (Ufa la Gregori, in Swahili) is the eastern branch of the East African Rift fracture system. The rift is being caused by the separation of the Somali Plate from the Nubian Plate , driven by a thermal plume .
A rift zone is a feature of some volcanoes, especially shield volcanoes, in which a set of linear cracks (or rifts) develops in a volcanic edifice, typically forming into two or three well-defined regions along the flanks of the vent. [1]
Zones of thickened crust, such as those formed during continent-continent collision tend to spread laterally; this spreading occurs even when the collisional event is still in progress. [7] After the collision has finished the zone of thickened crust generally undergoes gravitational collapse , often with the formation of very large extensional ...
The Afromontane archipelago mostly follows the East African Rift from the Red Sea to Zimbabwe, with the largest areas in the Ethiopian Highlands, the Albertine Rift Mountains of Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Tanzania, and the Eastern Arc highlands of Kenya and Tanzania.
The volcanic area of this rift covers the surface interface between the Mozambique orogenic fold belt and the Tanzania Craton. [1] A superplume exists beneath the craton. [4] [5] An indirect effect of rift and plume associated volcanism in the Tanzania Craton is the high levels of soil nutrients in Serengeti provided by volcanic ash from Ol ...