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Map of the Great Rift Valley. The Great Rift Valley (Swahili: Bonde la ufa) is a series of contiguous geographic depressions, approximately 6,000 or 7,000 kilometres (4,300 mi) in total length, the definition varying between sources, that runs from the southern Turkish Hatay Province in Asia, through the Red Sea, to Mozambique in Southeast Africa.
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 ...
Along its northeast margin, the African plate is bounded by the Red Sea Rift where the Arabian plate is moving away from the African plate. The New England hotspot in the Atlantic Ocean has probably created a short line of mid- to late-Tertiary age seamounts on the African plate but appears to be currently inactive. [5]
This paradoxically results in divergence which was only incorporated in the theory of plate tectonics in 1970, but still results in net destruction when summed over major plate boundaries. [2] Divergent boundaries are areas where plates move away from each other, forming either mid-ocean ridges or rift valleys. These are also known as ...
The Somali Plate is moving away from the African Plate in a split from Djibouti in the north, to Eswatini in the south. [2] The parting of these two plates formed the southern part of what used to be known as The Great Rift Valley. [3] In geological terms, the African and Somali plate separation has formed the East African Rift System (EARS ...
A simplified geologic map of the Afar Depression. The Afar Depression is the product of a tectonic triple-rifts junction (the Afar triple junction), where the spreading ridges forming the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden emerge on land and meet the East African Rift. The conjunction of these three plates of Earth's crust is near Lake Abbe.
The theory of continental drift has since been validated and incorporated into the science of plate tectonics, which studies the movement of the continents as they ride on plates of the Earth's lithosphere. [2] The speculation that continents might have "drifted" was first put forward by Abraham Ortelius in 1596.
Lake Baikal in Siberia, a World Heritage Site, [3] lies in an active rift valley. Baikal is both the deepest lake in the world and, with 20% of all of the liquid freshwater on earth, has the greatest volume. [4] Lake Tanganyika, second by both measures, is in the Albertine Rift, the westernmost arm of the active East African Rift.