{"id":655650,"date":"2026-05-08T09:07:22","date_gmt":"2026-05-08T09:07:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/655650\/"},"modified":"2026-05-08T09:07:22","modified_gmt":"2026-05-08T09:07:22","slug":"a-new-ocean-could-be-forming-as-africa-splits-apart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/655650\/","title":{"rendered":"A new ocean could be forming as Africa splits apart"},"content":{"rendered":"

When tectonic plates meet, mountains form, and oceans form where they drift apart.<\/p>\n

\"USGS<\/p>\n

\nA 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\u2014the Nubian and Somali\u2014splitting along the East African Rift Zone. (Source: USGS<\/a>)<\/p>\n

SEE ALSO: Pangolins, the animal kingdom ‘oddballs’, provide important conservation lessons<\/a><\/p>\n

The East African Rift System is drifting, causing a fracture between its Nubian plate, which contains much of the continent, and the smaller Somali plate that contains most of the eastern coast and Madagascar.<\/p>\n

Breakup further along than expected<\/p>\n

Researchers used seismic data to determine the thickness of the crust in the region, discovering it is only about 13 kilometres thick in the centre, far less than the 35-kilometre thickness along the edges of the rift.<\/p>\n

When a crust\u2019s thickness measures less than 15 kilometres, it enters a phase called \u201cnecking,\u201d where the odds of a continental breakup rise sharply.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve reached that critical threshold\u201d of crustal breakdown, Anne B\u00e9cel, a geophysicist at Columbia University\u2019s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and co-author of the study, said in a statement<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When tectonic plates meet, mountains form, and oceans form where they drift apart. A map of East Africa…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":655651,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[49,48,295,66],"class_list":["post-655650","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-environment","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/655650","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=655650"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/655650\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/655651"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=655650"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=655650"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=655650"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}