In the easternmost part of Africa, there is a scorching corner where our planet's crust is literally tearing apart: the Afar Depression. This hyper-arid landscape, located at the junction of Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Djibouti, is the only place in the world where three tectonic plates intersect and pull away from each other simultaneously (the Nubian, Somali, and Arabian plates), a phenomenon known as a tectonic triple junction.
As these rock masses pull apart at a rate of 1 to 2 centimeters per year, the continental crust has thinned so much that magma rises constantly, triggering colossal geological faults. The most dramatic moment of this process occurred in September 2005: following a series of earthquakes and the reactivation of the Dabbahu volcano, the ground split open abruptly, creating a fissure 60 kilometers long and up to 8 meters wide in just ten days. Millions of cubic meters of basaltic magma were injected into the fracture, exactly as happens along mid-ocean ridges.
With depressions already resting more than 120 meters below sea level, scientists estimate that within 5 to 10 million years, the waters of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden will eventually flood the basin. When that happens, the Horn of Africa will become a colossal island, and Earth will have gained a brand-new ocean.
Source: Nature (Wright et al., 2006: 'Magma-maintained rift segmentation at continental rupture in the 2005 Afar dyking episode')
