Researchers Are Worried a New Ocean and Continent Could Appear on Earth Faster Than We Thought

Planet Earth is constantly evolving. For billions of years, continents have shifted, smashed into others, reformed, and broken apart to form new tectonic plate arrangements. This phenomenon is explained by a scientific theory that continents continually undergo large-scale horizontal movements relative to one another, called continental drift, which originated in the early 20th century, per Britannica. The world's second-largest continent, Africa, is currently on the verge of splitting into two separate continents. A new research conducted by scientists at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has warned that the split is likely to occur sooner than expected.

Professor Ken MacDonald provided an estimate of when Eastern Africa may cleave out from the 35-mile-long fissure in Ethiopia and break into the Somali and Nubian plates. “What might happen is that the waters of the Indian Ocean would come in and flood what is now the East African Rift Valley,” MacDonald said. He predicted that the formation of a new ocean could possibly happen between the next one to five million years, double the pace as initially estimated. The professor assured that humans would only observe miniature changes of the larger process of continental drift throughout their lifecycle, in the form of earthquakes and volcanoes.  

The new ocean could range in depths similar to the Atlantic Ocean. He added, “On the human life scale, you won't be seeing many changes. You'll be feeling earthquakes, you'll be seeing volcanoes erupt, but you won't see the ocean intrude in our lifetimes.” According to the research, the findings have mainly focused on the exact locations of the branches formed as part of the East African Rift System, a 2000-mile rift formed about 22 million years ago. The Ethiopian fissure first occurred in 2005 in the desert now known as the East African Rift Valley. This massive crack in the Earth’s crust, precisely, the lithosphere, resides near the boundaries of the African, Arabian, and Somali plates, confirming the start of an impending continental drift.

 The report stated that the Arabian plate has been slowly shifting away from the African continent for the past 30 million years with the Somali plate showing similar tectonic behavior. The Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea were formed as part of the same continental shifts. Scientists yet have to deduce the mechanisms behind these tectonic movements. Alexandra Doten, former NASA, and Space Force consultant attempted to explain the formation of a sixth ocean as the African continent divided into two with the Great Lakes, the largest lakes on Earth, as evidence of the continental drift. 

“The lakes formed because Eastern Africa is separating from the rest of the continent,” she said on her Instagram channel (@astro.alexandra). Advanced technology like satellite gravity data sensors and seismic scans have helped further research to determine the occurrences beneath the Earth’s crust. In contrast, Dr. Sarah Stamps from the Department of Geosciences at Virginia Tech revealed in a 2020 study that the northern part of the Rift would create new oceans first. “The rate of extension is fastest in the north, so we'll see new oceans forming there first,” she said. Her observations indicated that the rate of present-day breakup of the plates occurred in millimeters per year. 

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