Birth of a New African Ocean

Khemisty writes "Formation of an ocean is a rare event, one no scientist has ever witnessed. Yet this geophysical nativity is unfolding today in one of the hottest and most inhospitable corners of the globe. Africa is splitting apart at the seams. From the southern tip of the Red Sea southward through Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, and Mozambique, the continent is coming unstitched along a zone called the East African Rift." This stretching of the earth's crust has been going on for 20 million years, and within another 10 million the Red Sea will have broken through to create a new sea.

Red Sea tag suggestion:

blamemoses.

Re:

No, it's global warming's fault.

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Hey now, this is still Slashdot. It's Microsoft's fault.

Re:Red Sea tag suggestion:

blamemoses.

Very true. How could this have been forming over the last 20,000,000 years when the earth is only 6,000 years old?

--
McCain/Palin '08!

Re:Red Sea tag suggestion:

Some Christians.

Re:Red Sea tag suggestion:

The Bible never gives an age for the Earth/Universe. Got to love the disconnected logic that allows a person to make things up at random and yet allows themselves to feel smugly superior to other people they claim are making things up.

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But it's accepted by Christians to be like 6000 years old. Seriously. They think that dinosaurs and humans coexisted.

Of course they coexisted. Haven't you ever seen The Flintstones?

Re:Red Sea tag suggestion:

Info came from "Science & Engineering Indicators" sudy conducted yearly by the national science foundation AS SAID IN MY POST. Some came from Gallup & People for the AWF (American Way Foundation). Feel free to explore either study i encourage it. I rounded a couple figures by 2% i think the psychic figure was actually 58%.

Re:Red Sea tag suggestion:

From the article you just linked:
""U.S. Religious Landscape Survey" that was issued in June, 21% of self-proclaimed atheists believe in either a personal God or an impersonal force. Ten percent of atheists pray at least weekly and 12% believe in heaven."

This alone shows that the study is screwed up. From my dictionary "Atheist - One who disbelieves or denies the existence of God or gods." Yet the study says 21% of atheists believe in God. That study is total bullshit.
Furthermore, Baylor University is a Baptist liberal arts school showing its bias from the start. So speaking in tongues isn't occult neither are magical men in the sky. Really by definition ALL christians believe in ghosts. Ever heard of the holy spirit? Go to their site they had the actually questions they used for the study. It is such a dishonest study its gross. Demons, satan, talking to god, heaven and hell aren't considered to be faults in logic while believing in traditional medicine is. Come on now... Of course atheists are more likely to have ouija boards than staunch christians, it is 'a tool of the devil' they could not have one in their home. And i doubt most people take it seriously they are just toys not magic. They tagged 'having read a book about nostradamus' as belief in the occult. Of course atheists will have a higher number, we READ more.

Re:Red Sea tag suggestion:

Wel, of course every sensible person acknowledges that the "6000 yr old" Earth is a tad outdated.
Why, this scientific estimate was made almost 400 YEARS AGO!
Bishop Usher, for all his great knowledge, did not have our modern scientific tools for such precise measurements.
Today's scientists now have revised this estimate, and consider the Earth to have been actually created in 7730BC.
And on January 23rd. (And alas, it was a Thursday, we believe - Pope Gregory corrupted the days of the week).

So called "evolutionists" are ALWAYS quoting this "6000 year old" red herring, hoping to discredit our creationist science. But it will not work!

Darwin, Hawkins et al will burn in Hell! (perhaps Darwin is already there, now that Limbo has been abolished - good riddance!)

Please- Try to use this new revised figure - 7730 BC.
You may use "BCC" or "BCE" - we shall tolerate it.
.

Wish I'd be around to see it

Bet there would be one very impressive waterfall when the Red Sea finally breaks through.

Re:Wish I'd be around to see it

Blasphemer! How dare you reduce the Second Great Flood to a mere "waterfall"!

You know what this means, of course

That 10 million years from now, the split will be complete. Slashdot will report this, and one /.er will complain, "It's a dupe! This story appeared 10 million years ago! What's up with the cyborg editors?"

What's up with the cyborg editors?

Still waiting for Linux to win the desktop.

Re:You know what this means, of course

That 10 million years from now, the split will be complete.

I've started moving 50 Gb worth of small files from a Windows box to a Linux box using Samba's default configuration + Windows explorer.

I figure we can use my progress bar as a reasonable approximation.

This thread is useless...

... without relief maps.

I don't want to read some art's grads long winded verbose description of something that can be shown to me in 2 diagrams.

Africa Become Flooded?

Well there goes property values...

doesn't seem that uncommon

There's another ocean forming in the Gulf of California. It's the same story with a rift underneath. The rift actually runs up to Albuquerque in New Mexico.

May it be a sign of the Flying Spaghetti Monster?

Maybe His Noodly Appendage wants us to bring new sea pirates to fight back global warming in the hottest place on Earth?

Re:May it be a sign of the Flying Spaghetti Monste

There are already a few pirates [google.com] in the vicinity.

No one?

"Formation of an ocean is a rare event, one no scientist has ever witnessed. Yet this geophysical nativity is unfolding today in one of the hottest and most inhospitable corners of the globe. Africa is splitting apart at the seams. From the southern tip of the Red Sea southward through Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, and Mozambique, the continent is coming unstitched along a zone called the East African Rift." This stretching of the earth's crust has been going on for 20 million years, and within another 10 million the Red Sea will have broken through to create a new sea.

So actually *every scientist* has witnessed this event...
KeS

Some Google Maps highlights

It's in this part of eastern Africa [google.com], adjacent to the junction of the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden in Ethiopia and Eritrea, and is known as the Afar Depression [wikipedia.org]. All this black stuff is Erte Ale [google.com], a volcano [wikipedia.org] that is almost continuously erupting. You can see the fresh black lava flows that historically oozed down the sides, and if you zoom in, you can see the red glow of the lava lake [google.com]. The salt pan areas [google.com] mentioned in the article are to the north (Danakil Depression), and are well below sea level (the Wikipedia page on the former settlement of Dallol [wikipedia.org] notes that Dallol is 50m above sea level, but that's the settlement site, not the lake/salt pan, which is lower). There are vast areas of stretched and faulted crust [google.com] to the southeast (the cliffs are the fault scarps), and Lake Assal [google.com], another salt lake 153 metres below sea level [wikipedia.org].

This area is more impressive if you fly over it in Google Earth rather than Google Maps. Practically every cone-shaped peak you see in this area is a volcano that has been recently or not so recently active, and to the south you can clearly see the flanks of the East African Rift and the series of lakes [google.com] that occupy the rift valley as far south as Kenya [google.com], Tanzania and Mozambique, interspersed with volcanoes [google.com] all along the way. This is an awesome part of the world for geology.

afar rift home page

For more information, you can try the Afar Rift Home Page [leeds.ac.uk] for the Afar Rift Project.

Re:Someone will blame this on...

Before long, someone will blame this on GlobalWarming.

Mention of this split WILL show up in someone's eco-speech.

And ideally they will get publicly called out on their idiocy

Here's another article on the Afar region
http://www.nj.com/south/index.ssf/2008/10/post.html [nj.com]
(they cite this article http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4512244.stm [bbc.co.uk] )

An 8-meter wide, 60-kilometer long rift (...) developed in the Afar desert region of north-eastern Africa in just 3 weeks. An earthquake on the 14th of September is said to have sparked the growing tear in the African desert, followed up by moderate tremors and then, finally, a volcanic eruption.

Re:Someone will blame this on...

I blame gay marriages, higher taxes and Obama Bin Laden. Sarah Palin will go maverick and fix this for us.